


The Juggling Eclipse

by thatsrightdollface



Series: Either the World is Broken, or it's Just a Road Trip AU [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon Divergence, Character Analysis, Coming of Age, Fluff, I definitely analyze some Insane Clown Posse lore in connection to Gamzee, I wanted to write something cozy, Insane Clown Posse - Freeform, M/M, Multi, Road Trip, Some angst, Theories, eclipse - Freeform, headcanons, no sgrub, sap, so many headcanons, some established romances, sorry - Freeform, this is really self-serving and silly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-12-22 15:15:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 22,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11970054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Every now and then, Alternia's twin moons shake in the sky.  And then, for reasons no one can properly explain, they circle each other.  And not just once...  They're juggled, if you will.  By an enormous cosmic clown, or something.Gamzee Makara and all eleven of his friends are going to watch the Juggling Eclipse from Terezi's hive, because that's the best place to see it for some reason.  Karkat thought it'd be fun for a few of them to go on a road trip to get there.  Some of it IS fun, and some of it definitely isn't.(I mapped this out while I was on a trip to see the total eclipse of the sun just a little while back...  Something to think about in the car while almost everyone else was sleeping.  I'm going to be updating it pretty fast!)





	1. Okay, let's go.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! Welcome to chapter one.
> 
> I know this is pretty silly, but thanks for reading. I hope you have fun with it! I have Karkat writing screenplays because of that one he wrote in the Paradox Space comics. Insane Clown Posse's Riddle Box definitely isn't mine to claim, either, I just thought it was interesting Gamzee has a poster of it hanging over his recuperacoon. Made me think it might be his favorite? 
> 
> (Some of my headcanons/interpretations may turn out to be very wrong. Sorry about that!)

Gamzee Makara kept on hoping his lusus would get home before Karkat came to pick him up, but if wishes were juggling clubs they would've all landed on the motherfucking floor. It might've been easier to tell the old seagoat that he was going on an adventure in person - an adventure with a moirail who wanted to spend extra time with him, no less, all cozy like the confetti and toxic rainbow spikes in a Subjugglator's canon. 

They were going to see the Juggling Eclipse, which was super motherfucking rare and - get this shit - something not even those unfunny sciensfiff types could completely reason away. Alternia's twin moons circled around each other, both the one the Condesce had bombed and the other, un-bombed one. They juggled themselves just because, sometimes, and nobody could understand it. 

You could see the whole thing from a lot of fucking places, but it would be especially good from Terezi's place in that pastel-and-crackling-leaves forest of hers. So everyone was meeting there - literally everyone in Terezi's contact list, she said. 

Gamzee ended up spelling out a message for his lusus on the beach outside his hive before they left. At least he'd gotten huge, lately, huge enough not to be scared of most of the seadweller kids and their war games.  Karkat had enough faith in Gamzee's clown paint and threatening height, his enormous curled horns and vastly improved juggling skills, that he was willing to stay out on the beach with him as he worked.  Karkat made snide, almost apologetic comments, like, "Not passive-aggressive enough. You should fucking _rub it in_ that you counted the nights he's been gone this time. He's going to have to suck it up it he wants to splash around with all his seagoat friends or whatever the fuck, soon."

In about a sweep, Gamzee and Karkat would both be old enough to be drafted to the stars, to Her Imperious Condescension's vast interstellar machine. No adult trolls were allowed on Alternia, after all.  If there were enough of them in one place, they could unite and rebel against their empress, again. Then they might actually be able to shove her spiky stiletto tyrant's heel right off.

Gamzee's seagoat lusus, of course, could be taken into motherfucking space, too. If Gamzee wanted him there. 

He was shuffling around spelling out a final giant smiley face on the beach, just then. Lots of grey sand had wiggled its way into his oversized clown sneakers, and was sticking between his toes. Gamzee knew he would end up on some imperial conquering ship or another, if the Condesce got her way.  He'd be another fucking club meant to pound new worlds into submission before they got motherfucking flooded.  Despite his sopor-sticky pan, with more holes in it than he'd like but a dull, breezy buzz all the damn time, now, he'd get called to those stars.  Called to kill. 

There were benefits to the Grand Highblood selling out their Mirthful Church to the empress, becoming her actual fucking attack barkbeasts.  (If they could be called “benefits.”) Gamzee could get culled, but it'd be harder than most. 

It wasn't time to tell Karkat about all their motherfucking plans, though, you know?  They were right on the tip of Gamzee's tongue, poised like a laughsassin about to swing out on the grief trapeze, raining death down along with a real smooth motherfucking flip. Those plans tasted Faygo sweet, but it wasn't time yet. 

Gamzee kept quiet and shifted his weight in the sand. 

He took one last, long look out over the ocean and no, no his lusus wasn't there like some kind of fucking last minute miracle.  Karkat stumbled over awkwardly, not used to walking on the beach, and rubbed Gamzee's arm. They were still trying to figure out what it was like being moirails in person, but Gamzee leaned in for a hug anyway. At first Karkat was very stiff, his arms loose and his face pulled back to look up at Gamzee, but then he relaxed a little. Squeezed him all motherfucking gentle, and rested a cheek against his shirt. 

"If you're fucking mad, say you're mad," Karkat said. "If you can't talk to me, who can you talk to?  Dumbass."

"I'm not _mad_ , motherfucker," Gamzee said. 

"I mean at your goat dad. Not me, obviously. I picked up Equius's ship for us, and packed a cooler of that ridiculous fucking sugar water you love so much, so I'd say I've been pretty amazing so far."

Gamzee laughed, nodded, and went inside to grab his stuff. Wasn't gonna bring much. Some extra shirts, the unicycle he could definitely ride, now, and that's even over the beach where unicycles were really not supposed to go…  Some stuff for making dinners, you know.  Karkat stood along with a bunch of blown-in sand in the doorway, taking in Gamzee's empty pie tins, ready for baking, his Faygo bottles and extra juggling clubs, the way his recuperacoon dribbled sopor in puddles over the already sticky floor...  Taking Gamzee in too, probably, as he tried to figure out which clothes were clean.

"I kind of can't believe it's you," Karkat said very quietly. "My goofy clown moirail wasn't just a figment of my stupidly overactive imagination."

"Nope," Gamzee said. "As real as you are, bro."

"And I'm not just about to pull an Old Karkat trick, like start monologuing at you about how if I _had_ dreamt you up I'd have changed this, this and this. Old Karkat was a shitstain."

"I dunno, man. I liked him a lot."  Gamzee had learned that keeping really calm and warm when Karkat was beating up on himself eventually got him to calm down, too. 

Karkat smiled wryly, kicking some sand out with him as he went. "Well, _you_ would. You have shitty taste."

Gamzee smiled vaguely at the Troll Jokers Cards portraits on his walls. Mostly at the Troll Riddle Box - which was probably his favorite. All about what was at the core of a person. What would be deep inside, when everything was said and done, keeping them going.  Karkat said all this motherfucking weird shit all the time, but that wasn't what Gamzee thought was at his center. His drive wasn't really based on typing up intense and convolutedly vulgar metaphors in capslock, or on wanting to lash out at fucking everybody... And whatever parts of him were based on self-hate?  That was Gamzee's motherfucking job to work with. To shoosh down until they hurt a little less. Right?  It wasn't like Karkat was about to fly off the handle and start murdering everybody with sickles like little crab pincers, anyway. 

Karkat was right that it didn't feel actually real, yet.  Gamzee's wrist was being grabbed by stubby grey fingers with impossibly warm blood pulsing underneath...  He was being led out of his own hive and off to places he probably wouldn't have ever gone.  It didn't feel real to have Karkat wanting to take him away from that motherfucking beach. They left his empty hive by a still and staring ocean, under a hundred thousand wheeling stars.  Karkat's hand was small on Gamzee's almost-adult wrist. He'd sharpened his claws recently, maybe the night before, but they were still dull and soft. 

It didn't feel real to be led into a ship Equius designed, either, which was about as full of random horse stuff as Gamzee'd expected. One of the ship's controls was shaped like a horse head, and the other like a leg... The emergency break was something else altogether. There were a gazillion motherfucking lights all flashing and shit, and Gamzee realized he didn't have the first idea how to pilot something like that, huge and with metal centaur sculptures all bolted to the floor and a special conveyor belt for delivering milk. 

"Equius, as you can see, remains Equius. Now, put on your seatbelt where I can _fucking see you_ , and don't do anything especially pan-rot stupid until we're in the air."  Karkat had only recently started sounding worried about Gamzee in texts, but it was something altogether different to hear it in person. The worry had probably started around when Gamzee'd kind of overdosed on sopor and gone MIA for a little while.  Just sick, you know.  Just kind of tipping over the point of no return and then see-sawing back up like it had been a funny act.  It wasn't a big motherfucking deal, but Karkat had sent the person who lived closest - Eridan - to check on him, and a whole thing.  Even those worried texts had seemed a lot like yelling, though.  Fuck, they probably _had_ been yelling. 

Now, Gamzee hammed it up a little buckling his seatbelt, whining like he imagined some trolls did to lusii who told them not to do a lot of things. He smiled all broad and silly and Karkat sighed, pressed his shoulders back into his chair. 

"Once we pick up Eridan and are flying steady over the ocean, then you can come sit with me up front. I want to tell you about a new screenplay I'm working on... I need to know if you can guess the twist.  If you can, that shit is changing for _sure_." 

So far, Gamzee had read a few of Karkat's screenplays...  He had yet to guess the "twist" to any of them, or really understand how he was supposed to feel about all the different quadrant dynamics. But it would be a good time, and he said so. Karkat said it had better be, because he was really on to something here, he could feel it. Old Karkat was dumb for believing in those _other_ screenplays.

He'd have to finish this one up fast.  In about a sweep, while he had a chance.  

That left Gamzee thinking about the plans he and his friends were still keeping from Karkat, as well as tightly strapped in to a Grand Highblood's throne-themed chair he suspected Equius had designed just for him.  The weapon slots with actual weapons in them already were probably a good clue, along with the make-believe blood splatters and lack of cup holders. 

He looked out the window at his hive getting shudderingly, slowly smaller, and then at the back of Karkat's head. A nude horse man was staring at him, but Gamzee figured he'd get used to that before they even crept close to Terezi’s hive and the Juggling Eclipse. 


	2. Did our ship look at you funny, or something?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome back! If you've been away. :P Yeah, I'm posting this story really, really fast. Thanks for bearing with me! 
> 
> I may add more here if I think of anything in particular, but... I guess for now I'll just apologize. Again. I really like the idea of Gamzee and Karkat protecting each other in different ways, I guess. :') Also... Headcanons. And making up random Alternian landmarks.... Heh. We'll see how it turns out. 
> 
> Have a great day!

Gamzee was pretty sure he'd never win the strategy game Eridan had carried onboard along with all his carefully matched and locked-up luggage.  That was alright. The game was mostly troops getting directed across the board one way or another, performing mysterious tactical maneuvers. It also involved exchanging tiny gold coins with the Condesce's seal on them, and a fleet of psionic battleships Eridan had put together and painted up himself. They'd played a few times, bent over a collapsible table Equius had printed with an ornate oil painting of horse men flexing some motherfucking ridiculous muscles. 

One time, Gamzee was pretty sure he saw Eridan pull an extra ship out of the pocket of his skinny hipster pants.  He didn’t say anything, though.  Eridan got so happy when he won, after all.

A few times, Karkat got brave and either put the ship on cruise control or let Eridan drive.  Those periods never really lasted.  Maybe some enormous, barnacle-studded lusus would stretch up out of the dark water beneath them and he’d get a little antsy.  Maybe there’d be some sheer sea cliffs only _he_ could navigate, he said, because of all the motherfucking smashed-up ships rusting along their backs.  Or maybe he’d just lost Eridan’s army game and had to go step out before he got sucked into a rant about how the thing wasn’t really like being one of the Empress’s generals at all. 

But Karkat _did_ eat lunch with them, covering up Equius’s hoofbeast table with a bunch of maps to show off their route.  They’d be hitting some of Alternia’s best spots – special ruins, fancy caves practically bleeding crystals, that one motherfucking creepy city built out of an enormous rat-lusus’s dried husk.  Gamzee was all touched that Karkat had thought to slip in a trip to the Jestprophet’s Show, too, which was an amazing mechanical circus of motherfucking prophesy and wonder.  Some adult Subjugglator had set it up running sweeps and sweeps before, and people said it had never stopped going along since. 

Karkat said he knew the thing just dribbled out “diarrhea-words” that didn’t mean anything, but even so…  And then he caught himself.  A dark red flush crept over his cheeks that Gamzee and Eridan both pretended not to see.  Karkat had been trying not to diss Gamzee’s faith so much, since really understanding he could die all of a sudden same as everyone else.  Gamzee’d been supposed to cut down on sopor, too, after that.  Karkat said they’d get him off “that shit” in a couple sweeps for sure, nice and slow so he didn’t hurt too much.  He’d caught himself then, too, for an entirely different reason.

“It’ll be badass as _fuck_ to hear those motherfucking prophesies,” Gamzee laughed, leaning back and giving Karkat some eyes he hoped looked moirail-sweet instead of just sleepy and high.  “Thanks.  Really.”

For a while, Karkat listened to Eridan go on about people he’d met and thought about trying to get in one quadrant or another.  Gamzee closed his eyes and listened, a mostly-empty bottle of Faygo loose in his hand.  When _it_ happened, Eridan was saying how nervous he was to see Feferi again after she’d broken off their moirallegiance, and Gamzee was wondering if he’d remembered to bring any pie without sopor, and Karkat was fiddling with one of those little model ships so much he might have nearly broken it.   

And then, just like that, something scraped against the side of their ship.  It made a sound like metal screaming, all motherfucking despair, like in a service to honor the Vast Honk that was always, always just around the corner.  The whole motherfucking ship swerved and rattled down to its bones. Eridan’s game went skittering away; the Faygo cooler got turned over against Gamzee’s weird Grand Highblood chair and then there were bottles all over the motherfucking place.

Karkat yelled all the time, normally, but now that something was actually going down he got dead quiet.  He pointed Gamzee and Eridan to their seatbelts, and turned back to the helm.  A muscle was working up a frenzy in his jaw.

Gamzee and Eridan both followed Karkat, then, steps unsteady as the ship careened, all trying to steady itself like it was alive or something.  There wasn’t really enough room for everyone to fit in front of the controls, so Gamzee ended up watching from past Eridan’s gelled hair, his salt-stiff scarf.

It was a bunch of seadwellers in a gilded ship, shaped like some kind of plated steampunk-ish shark that had rammed them.  The leader had her hair in dainty, pinned-up ringlets, studded with pearls.  They were yelling something about a lowblood ship blotting out their royal sky, blah blah blah, you know the motherfucking drill.  Gamzee had heard shit like it plenty of times, when the only advice his lusus gave him was to stay off the fucking beach.  All he’d been able to think of to order Equius to do, way back when.  Keep the fuck away from trolls like this girl.

“Lemme talk to them, Kar,” Eridan said, seconds before they got rammed again.  “Those glubbin wannabes should know who they’re reel-y dealin with.”

And then, y’know.  _They got rammed again._   Apparently, the girl with pearls in her hair and sewn into her metal-plated pirate boots didn’t really give a shit who they were.  Maybe Equius’s logo on their ship’s side was enough.

Karkat definitely _tried_ to keep the ship from spinning out.  Gamzee didn’t think he really stood a motherfucking chance, but he held his breath and prayed for a second anyway.  He could hear his heartbeat loud as frenzied church drums in his skull.   

As their ship went down, Eridan fished his infamous gun, Ahab’s Crosshairs, out of the motherfucking air.  Everyone was so used to having activated strife specubi (Gamzee was pretty sure that was the plural), those days, but they kept on looking like magic just the same.  Eridan leaned past Karkat and opened the side window a bit – he murmured all gruff that he’d sort this shit out right good.  And then he aimed at the captain with those motherfucking pearl boots.  Just, Eridan was used to shooting enormous lusii, generally.  _And_ shooting them while not spinning around like a screaming top.  So in the end, they really just put a nasty, smoking new dent into the shark ship’s golden hide.  The captain was definitely not okay with that.

Water flooded the cabin when their ship finally crashed.  For a second, the window wasn’t going back up – Eridan strapped Ahab’s Crosshairs over his back without a thought and got back to work.  He bellowed in a raw and commanding voice Gamzee had never heard before that he should get his weapons out because they were sure to be boarded.  “Shore” to be boarded?  Karkat was frozen, jaw hanging open, now, and hair plastered down by sea water.

“New plan.  Get the lights,” Eridan barked.  He was straightening the ship out underwater and aiming it back to the sky, but one of the wings had gone loose and hanging.  The balance was all off.  “Get the fuckin lights, we have to _malfunction_ …”

Gamzee thought back to a time he’d been waiting on the beach for his seagoat lusus to get home, sweeps ago, and had ended up passed out in the sand.  When he woke up, hazy and sopor-spinning, he saw some seadweller kids much bigger than him walking away.  Gold coins rattled in bags tied to their belts – violet lights throbbed just under their skin, like they belonged to the deepest sea.  They must’ve thought Gamzee was already dead, Tavros suggested, later.  Left him as a warning.  Not much sport in killing him if he was already cold and still, blood going slow as sopor slime. 

“Act dead,” Gamzee said. 

“An then we get ‘em,” Eridan finished.  “Once they’re lootin us.  Or comin in to make sure we’re shark bait.”

Karkat breathed deeply, muttering streams of what he would later call _actual_ “diarrhea-words.”  There was already enough water swimming in that cabin to reach Gamzee’s knee.  Karkat had conked his head against something, and the blood trickling past his eye was so motherfucking bright it didn’t look real.  He fucked with the lights a little, and finally got them to crackle and go dark.  Those seadwellers wouldn’t know Equius’s tech was better than a fuck up like that.  They were bringing their ship down, just then, and the sound of their golden shark’s metal jaws clanged strangely through the water.  Like a summons; like a motherfucking taunt.

Gamzee reached back, drew what he could of Karkat’s rom-coms out of his aching pan.  “You know I’m so pale for you it hurts, right?” 

Karkat snorted and shook his head, like he didn’t know how to reply. 

“So let me and Eridan bring the divine motherfucking rage down on these guys.”  Gamzee waited, but Karkat didn’t seem to get it.  It was just that he was bleeding red, and his bones were so thin and fragile. Crackly inside, the makings of special stardust.  It was just that they had plans set up, all of them, that Karkat really had to live to see.  It was just that this was the very beginning of a trip Karkat had mapped out for them, to mark what he thought was his last sweep in the waking world. 

“Gam…” Eridan warned.  “It’ll be any second now.”

“If you hide and let me take care of you this time, I’ll do – fuck, I dunno what I’ll do." 

"Gam..."

"What would you _want_ me to do?”

Gamzee couldn’t think of anything better, but somehow it worked.  Karkat glowered as he ducked down to the respite block beneath the floor, and Eridan nodded, lips squeezed tight together.  Maybe Karkat meant to press Gamzee’s arm gently as he pushed by, or maybe he’d meant to shove him back and it came out wrong. 

Gamzee let out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding either way.


	3. If Eridan's at the wheel, will they still kill us?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi~ 
> 
> I feel like Karkat understands more about the people around him than he knows how to act on... So, yeah, some of that comes to play here. I also feel like Gamzee has a very powerful rage-side, like what came to play during the battle with the Black King even before his Lil Cal possession... That he's really not familiar with, but that the Condesce would want to draw more and more to the front.
> 
> Idk!! :) I hope this works. If I forgot something/messed something up, sorry.

When Equius got creepily into the idea of Gamzee cracking someone’s motherfucking bones up, it was kinda sad but he really wasn’t that surprised.  Gamzee had sort of known Equius would want to hear more about how he’d swallowed a little splattered blood and made a joke about it – how he’d been so blotted out by rage that it had been hard for Karkat to drag him back – than he’d want to hear about everyone making it out okay.  Fucking typical.   

It _also_ wasn't that surprising when Equius paused, breathing heavily into the communicator, and then confessed that while he'd come and help his bros out, sure, he wouldn't do it on the motherfucking ocean. Gamzee hadn't really been expecting anything else.  Yeah, he still sometimes couldn't tell what color some person or another's blood was, but Equius had explained an ancient fucking rivalry or whatever between the land-based highbloods and seadwellers a _lot_ of times. That motherfucker liked the whole pomp and ceremony thing about keeping old anger going like that. He hadn't even shared his chat name with Eridan until Nepeta bribed him with shippy hoofbeast drawings Gamzee hadn't asked too much about. 

"Got it, man," Gamzee said, nodding at Karkat until he nodded back, once, short and stiff and still a little furious. "We'll float this motherfucking ship over to some shore or another and get this murder circus back on the road."

"Wait," Karkat spat. " _Some ‘shore?'_ So he's... Oh, that _blood-obsessed, elitist little hoofbeast fucker_..."

"You may tell our friend Karkat that his lewd language and - and doubtlessly flailing arms notwithstanding, I have made up my mind," Equius said, his voice low and oily, like a purring engine. "That is, if it pleases you, Highblood."

"Hey, Karkat, brother, Equius said he's pretty set on this," Gamzee offered.  It was harder than usual to keep his smile soft, just then.  "At least he'll fix the ship up and shit, though."

Karkat rolled his eyes and gagged in a way that was probably supposed to make Gamzee laugh.  He went back to drying out the ship’s insides.  This was, he’d said, possibly the best use that would ever be gotten out of the hair dryer Eridan brought along.  He’d put Eridan himself to work hooking up some escape pods they’d salvaged from the seadwellers’ ship to the underside of their own craft.  They were gonna act like a motherfucking motorboat until they could get the wing on better.  Eridan had asked whether he looked hot covered in motor grease and bandages – he’d cut himself on the fucking metal propeller things, and almost lost an ear fin to the girl with pearl boots just before that.  Gamzee said sure, and Eridan huffed that he glubbin better. 

( _Then_ he got Gamzee to take a picture of him pretending to do escape pod-attaching things.  Gamzee was supposed to send it to Sollux like it was a totally natural, normal thing to do – “Be suave,” Eridan said.  “Like we _didn’t_ just stage this shot.”  Gamzee sent the picture along, but he wasn’t sure he nailed the “suave” part.  Sollux just responded with, “oh my gog gz what ii2 thii2,” which made a lot of sense, really.  Gamzee wrote back, “ErIdAn, BrO :o)” and left it at that.  Suave?)

“You are too gracious, Highblood,” Equius purred, again, back in the present.  Gamzee’d gotten kind of lost in memory.  Equius’s voice sounded really wet and close to his ear, even through the mobile husktop. 

Gamzee imagined just for a second, then, what it would have been like to make his own voice all motherfucking rubbery and flesh-ripping funny, again.  Second time in one night, yeah?  He wore the Grand Highblood’s own seal over his motherfucking chest.  He could get fucking rowdy and subjugglate the shit out of Equius right then, order him to get his slimy, classist ass out to their ship and help.  Gamzee could’ve done it, and Equius wouldn’t have even tried to stop him.  He’d probably’ve just moaned, and groveled, and motherfucking got off on that shit.  You know the old saying – two unfunny motherfuckers with one weaponized can of Silly String, after all.

But that was something Gamzee really hated, thinking how Equius wanted him to become the kind of person who would pull that kind of cold, unrighteous noise on his own motherfucking friends.  He was still crusted with other people’s insides, just then, and so wild-eyed and shaky Karkat had opened a Faygo bottle for him and passed it over all gentle.  If Equius didn’t want to give Gamzee something, fucking fine.  Wasn’t even a thing. 

Gamzee hung up the phone a little angry, to be honest.  He’d been slow to get mad at Equius over the sweeps, but there _was_ some frustration rotting there in the dark of him.  What all did Equius want Gamzee to be?  Would he have minded a whole ton if Karkat hadn’t been able to drag him out of his raging laugh-murder self, that side of Gamzee that had helped trash a lot of the ship?  Eridan had had to tape his game board back together, and that just by itself was kinda motherfucking sad. 

Karkat started up some of the music on his husktop, when they got going again.  Eridan said he’d been expecting something with a lot of drums and yelling, but maybe it was better he played some of those soft, romantic ballads just then.  Gamzee could squint and imagine a few of the palemance songs might’ve felt just a little like what they had, to Karkat.  He could imagine they were on the playlist because of him. 

Eridan was steering the ship fulltime, by that point.  They were drifting with their heads just above the deep in prime seadweller turf.  It had even been voted that Eridan should fly his flag from those old pirating FLARP sessions, to be like, “Motherfuckers, it’s that Ampora guy, ready to wreck your shit.”  And that was despite their ship looking all motherfucking pathetic, with the broken wing and all.  Eridan said they better appreciate his sacrifice. 

Karkat didn’t say anything when Gamzee ate a little gloppy, tongue-buzzing sopor pie and fell asleep.  Actually, he just glanced up from whatever he was scribbling in his notebook and looked a little sad.  Conflicted.  Probably knew why he was taking it, though…  Probably was still a little shaken up from trying to get a ragged, giggling rage-voice to shift back into something softer.  Couldn’t blame him.  Eridan was all, “That’s life on the waters, y’know,” but Karkat had said earlier that there were reasons he’d never bought into the whole FLARP-ing pirate scene.    

Karkat watched Gamzee get settled in the only chair big enough for him to curl up in – that stupid, almost properly motherfucking _enraging_ Grand Highblood throne.  Gamzee propped his head up on a bent arm, ran sopor-y fingers through his hair.  He was still freaking out a little at his own self – or really, at how quick he was to let go of himself, whenever there was something _else_ reaching out for his thinkpan.  It wasn’t that Gamzee hadn’t had to defend himself before, kind of, now and then over the sweeps.  But this felt real, and close.  Maybe it was that Gamzee hadn’t had a lot of sopor, last little while?

Maybe because it was like a preview of all the hilarious rage clowning that could still come to be, someday, among Her Imperious Condescension’s stars.

Karkat didn’t wake Gamzee up until they were already wherever the fuck they’d been going.  Alternia’s searing sun was making its way up over the horizon to see what was up, by then.  They were bobbing around in front of what looked to be a hollow shell of dead coral and rocks, with lights burning inside and modern sea-shanties about star conquest drifting out over the water.  Gamzee had a hard time prying his eyes all the way open, but Karkat was patient.

“We’re at some douchey fish bar,” he confided, when Gamzee was sitting up a little better.  He tilted Gamzee’s chin up to look at him, studying his eyes for lingering orange-tinted rage, for the telltale clouds of sopor.  Gamzee held very still, so Karkat could get a good idea where his head was at.  “I guess Eridan used to take Vriska here, when they were doing their pirate kismesis/weird ancestor roleplay kink stuff.  They know him.”

Nothing really hurt anymore, as Gamzee stood up and dragged himself over to help Eridan tie their ship to the gem-studded dock.  He didn’t think Karkat noticed when he almost swayed into the water. 

Everybody had to clean up real good before they went inside.  It was a classy sort of place, said Eridan.

Eventually, they got led someplace dark and in the back, past velvety privateers with electric robot eyes, past washed-up ocean trolls with raggedy ear fins and seaweed knotted like ribbons in their hair.  Their server winked at Eridan.  She had glossy green mother-of-pearl worked into her cheek, like stylized water pooling in the valleys of her scars.

Eridan ordered for everyone in a whisper, so Gamzee really had no motherfucking clue what he was getting.  Karkat fiddled with the thick, thick bandages they’d set over where his forehead had been bleeding; he watched a lazy fan spin and spin above them all. 

It was Eridan that finally broke their silence by announcing, “So, I gotta say, this dumb eclipse thing is turnin out better than I thought it would, at least.  Fuckin kinda had to – what with, y’know, Fef.  But when I posted about getting rammed outta the glubbin sky, she started messagin me all worried, an…  Mm.”

“Mm,” Karkat agreed.  “That _is_ better than I expected.”

Eridan flushed, waved webbed fingers in front of his face as if trying to chase away smoke.  “I _mean_ , Kar, what’s even the point a watchin our moons spin, anyway?  It doesn’t even mean any-fin if no one knows how it’s happenin.”

“That’s the best part, motherfucker,” Gamzee drawled.  He was happy for the noise, honestly.  Happy for the hopeful, awkward swagger Eridan could pull on like a cape when he wanted to.

“Dammit, though.  Kar.  The point I was gettin to _was_ : I don’t wanna think about Fef, now.  Not until she messages me back.  Tell us about this famous screenplay you’ve been puttin together, or somethin – gotta be done in a year, all that.  I never really read the blocks of text you sent me.  I mean.  ‘Reel-y.’”

“I always kind of suspected, asshole,” Karkat grumbled.

“Sol doesn’t, either,” Eridan pointed out, smiling with all his near-transluscent seadweller fangs.  “Now, _shoot_ , Kar.”

Karkat stalled for a minute or so, rattling on about how the characters’ arcs weren’t completely finalized yet, how he’d been meaning to work with Sollux to get one of the psiioniic flushed leads just right.  And then he told them all _exactly_ what was what about his screenplay, and their food came, and Gamzee found himself feeling pretty motherfucking at home there.  With his cheek cupped in a sticky palm; with his moirail going on about the complexity of modern matespritship. 

Gamzee’d worried he’d never really feel at home, sometimes.  Not until the paradise planet, stretched full of circus tents and crackling Faygo rivers, all revelry and fear in the shadow of the Vast Honk.  But there, then, it sort of felt like it was happening.  Even there in the middle of such an angry ocean, on such an angry grey world.  If someone had called out that Gamzee’s seagoat lusus was swimming past the window, he might not have even bolted up to see.  


	4. And what does it mean if he just makes horse noises?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again! If you've stuck with this silly story so far.... Geez, thanks so much. I really appreciate it, and I hope you enjoy it. I felt really guilty that there hasn't been a lot of EriSol yet, so I THINK I got two chapters ready for today. I may regret this if I find some kind of giant error.... But chapter 5 is what I'd consider a very EriSol chapter, and I'm posting both at once.
> 
> For now... Behold: the Equius and Nepeta chapter! I almost never write about these guys. I wanted to think about how Gamzee's emotions towards Equius might shift and get frustrated over the sweeps, if there isn't a change (maybe as he comes to respect himself more? A possibility, at least?) And ALSO how crap at flirting Equius is, because I suspect he's just flirting with Gamzee all the time. Like, differently than he might to a different highblood? I could, of course, be wrong.

By the time they got to the shore where Equius was waiting – after two red herring beaches, with absolutely no Equius anyplace around – Gamzee had been taught to drive the ship.  Give Karkat a break; look all Subjugglator-dangerous behind the controls.  It was a gamble, for sure, but Eridan was just “So Glubbin Done” with driving all the time, so what could they do?  He’d gone to go “sleep,” which Karkat said just meant obsessing over whether his first flushed love would want to see him again after all the sweeps they’d been apart.  (The answer was probably, “I don’t know, kind of?” but Eridan wouldn’t have wanted to hear that.) 

At first Gamzee had sort of hated holding all their lives in his claws.  He kept imagining Karkat’s impossibly red blood fanning out in the water like the afterimage of fireworks on a dark sky.  But by that point, he’d gotten almost good at missing the rocks.  He was playing some of his worshipful clown rap over the ship’s speakers, and Karkat was reading a romance novel with his feet draped over his lap.  Every now and then Karkat would snort in disbelief, or crow, “I fucking knew it!” or clue Gamzee in on something ridiculous going down in the story.  He didn’t seem to mind that much when Gamzee sang quietly along with some of the songs he knew better, even when the chorus dissolved into a bunch of honks, that wicked “amen” that meant the righteous end of the world.  There _were_ a couple songs he asked if they could skip, but that was cool. 

It was Karkat who saw Equius first, standing still as one of his carved hoofbeast statues right in the middle of the beach.  He pointed, snickered, “He’s crossing his arms at us like he’s just _so fucking impatient_.”

Gamzee remembered what Equius’s plans had been before those seadwellers and the crash – he and Nepeta were going on a motherfucking moirail thing, like a date that lasted for nights and nights and involved a lot of spontaneous hunting sessions.  Equius had made sure to message Gamzee some criticism/apology combos, all up and passive-aggressively asking permission to disappear for a while.  Sure, Gamzee liked being in the loop with his friends and all, but the more sweeps passed with Equius messaging him like that…  Shit.  How even was he _supposed_ to respond?  Talking to Equius was like living in one of those fucking unwinnable puzzle games Sollux and Aradia played together, which made Gamzee’s brain feel stretched out thin.  Like it had been unwound and then pumped full of air, twisted into balloon animals like he’d heard some Subjugglators got up to. 

By then, of course, Gamzee _knew_ he was a pretty disappointing, too-passive highblood, all polluted by Faygo and sopor.  It was old fucking news.  Did Equius just want to change him?  Why didn’t he just go off and find some new highblood who’d kick him around, if that’s what he really wanted?  

Or were they, you know, actually _friends_?  What the fuck had Equius meant, building him a special Grand Highblood chair, messaging him every damn day, if they weren’t _something_?  

But that’s why Gamzee wasn’t too surprised when Nepeta rounded past some of the dank and mossy beach rocks, flowers in her hair and different kinds of blood all soaked into her jacket sleeves.  She wasn’t wearing her claws, but she looked at their boat-ship-thing’s approach like she’d been starving, like she hadn’t hunted in a long time.  Gamzee wasn’t surprised, but Karkat gasped, crinkling his romance novel up against his chest.

“Aw, that’s just fucking perfect,” he said, voice sinking down so, so low.  “She’s going to want to talk to me.”

Nepeta had recently told Karkat she was all flushed for him.  Gamzee’d gotten a bunch of ranty, panicked messages about it at the time.  Poor kitty sis hadn’t even meant to slip it out the way she did, probably.  She’d ended up telling Karkat all about a roleplay character she’d made for him around the same time, too, landing them both with a flustered mess of a chat log that was part character stats, part hasty explanations for why their two characters happened to be dating in some stories she’d forgotten to delete…  Gamzee winced a little, thinking back on that noise.  Karkat hadn’t known what the fuck to say.

Looked like he still had no idea what he was going to go with, to be honest. Why hadn’t Gamzee thought to tell him Nepeta might be around?  Damn, his mind was wandering itself all over the fucking place.  And she was up on her tiptoes, craning to get a better view of their ship and everything.

“Fuck.  Sorry,” Gamzee started.  He was trying to drag the ship up to the beach nice and neat; he was sorting out his words a little, like untangling knotted thread.

Karkat might have heard, but he was busy drawing his legs off Gamzee’s lap, bundling himself down to the deep of the ship.  He was smoothing his hair.

“Don’t let them come onboard yet,” Karkat said.  “ _Stall_.”  

So, Gamzee stalled.  It wasn’t hard.  Equius’s eyes were wide and bloodshot behind his cracked-void glasses – he was “ _There_ you are, Highblood”-ing all over Gamzee as soon as he flopped out of the half-sunken ship and made his way onto the sand.  The shadows under Equius’s eyes were a deeper, oilier blue than Gamzee remembered. 

“Let’s get this motherfucker up on the beach, I guess,” Gamzee said.  He tapped a finger against one of the flowers in Nepeta’s hair, like he was honking her nose.  Tried his best to look comforting and clueless.

Gamzee was pretty sure they’d all get to help with the ship, for a second, and it would be nice and distracting… But then Equius was all, “Yes, Highblood.  Thank you for the order…!”  And honestly, Gamzee should’ve known that’s what would motherfucking happen.  Come on, brother.  Why didn’t the motherfucker just go get ordered around by a clown that wanted to be a church ringmaster, or some shit?

Equius practically tripped over his long, knobby legs on the way down to the water.  Then, he dragged that ship all by himself, with Gamzee and Nepeta just staring.  It took, like, a couple seconds. 

When Equius got back, he was the closest to a smile Gamzee had ever seen him when he wasn’t whispering with Nepeta off and alone – and that wasn’t really motherfucking close at all.  His cracked teeth were like the jagged ocean rocks Gamzee’d just been swerving around for the past few hours, with a wet darkness pooling between them.  All shadows seemed very dark and sticky, on Equius.  He did something that could only be described as a motherfucking _bow_ , then, with a few old-timey hand flourishes and everything.  Equius was the only person who ever bowed to Gamzee.  “ _Done_ , Highblood.  Done.  If I may be so bold, you’ve given me hope over the last few nights that you might not be a true waste of such…  _Precious_ …  Fluids.” 

“He knows how you feel about his blood, Equius,” Nepeta almost scolded.  “He might like if you showed what you think of the _rest_.”  Nepeta was pretty tired, Gamzee noticed.  Too tired to put on the chipper, cutesy voice he generally associated with her. 

Equius huffed out a little sigh that sounded uncannily like it could’ve come from an actual hoofbeast.  It felt like they’d had this conversation before; Gamzee felt it the same way he knew when the effects of a pie were slowly wearing off.  The way he knew he wanted to be someone Karkat could trust, and knew the Vast Honk was fated to come some way or another.

Honestly, it was a relief when Karkat and Eridan climbed out of the ship together, Eridan’s shoulders hunched forward under his cape the same way they did when he was plotting his next move in a strategy game.  Karkat cleared his throat messily – he shot Gamzee some motherfucking silently screaming eyes.  Gamzee rambled over to him, pulled him up against his side real quick.  Whatever Karkat did next, he would never have to do it alone.

What Karkat did next was walk off from the beach with Nepeta, actually, up the sandy crags and down a little path lined with shell lanterns and thorny, weather-beaten trees.  Gamzee watched them go with a frown tugging at his lip.  That evening, Karkat had watched him paint on his smile for the first time – all the soft, rounded edges of his clown makeup turning his expressions into something like how he imagined himself.  Karkat had said something about how strange it was to watch everybody grow up.  Like they were all puzzles being put together, photos coming into focus.  He’d sounded so wistful, so far away.  Like he already thought of himself as gone.

Gamzee had ached a little, wanting to spill out everything he knew in a frenzy, like the flurry of bombastic music right at the start of a big show Karkat didn’t even realize was beginning.  Drums and clattering bone; whoopee cushions and squelching meat as it tore.  But he’d kept quiet, smoothing down his cheeks and lining his eyes.  Karkat said he looked even more like a stranger without his paint on, which only made him want to paint faster. 

Probably Karkat hadn’t meant anything by it.  Probably just thought it was funny, except Gamzee didn’t.

Nepeta had stood up on her tiptoes again to kiss Equius’s cheek before she left.  He’d bent down to meet her.  She forced out an awkward, shaky little giggle right into his ear, and whispered something.  Equius shook his head. 

He said, “Stay close to the shore, where I can hear if you scream.”

And Nepeta chirped, “Yeah, yeah.  Bossy.”  She might have adjusted that to “paw-sy,” if she had been feeling more like herself.

By the time Karkat and Nepeta rounded a corner and were gone, Equius had retreated beneath their ship’s wing.  The sound of metal being shoved back into place almost drowned out the motherfucking sea.  Amazingly strong, that guy.  Strong like whatever cosmic juggler got it in their pan to juggle the moons.  Those brittle little trees lining Karkat and Nepeta’s path shuddered against a wind.  Gamzee watched them try and hold on.

It was a while of daydreaming before Eridan appeared like a smirking ghost just behind Gamzee and announced, “Alright, time to go, Gam.  We’ve got a _mission_.”

“Wha-?”

“I was gonna bring Kar, but he’s gotten himself otherwise occupied.”

Gamzee blinked, straightened his back a little.  “And what kind of motherfucking mission are we all supposed to do?”

Eridan’s eyes had a coy, piratical gleam to them just then.  There was a fierceness in him Gamzee remembered from back in the old Vriska-hatemance days.  “We gotta go bust Sol outta his respite block and get him to come adventurin with us.  He lives around here – it’ll be easy.  Just gotta find a ride into the city an figure out which communal hive stem is his.  Then, his actual hive.  Then we fuckin _nab_ him!”

Gamzee considered.  “That… Doesn’t actually sound easy, bro.”

Eridan ducked his head, the eager, hungry smile still twisting up his lips.  “Gam.  Trust me.  Sol needs this.”

Gamzee was sort of aware what weird shit had gone down with Eridan and Sollux a while back.  Apparently, Karkat had hooked them up as online gaming partners one night, when Eridan was especially sad about Feferi blocking him on Troll Steam.  That had gone pretty great, at first.  They were all about those snide taunts and game-rivalries – the fact that Sollux could crush Eridan if he wanted to but was still okay with just messing around sometimes made him the right kind of competitor for a “delicate fucking prince.”

(As Karkat said.  At the time.) 

But _then_ , Eridan had caught Sollux playing some funny adventure game or another with his sweet, lost Fef, and whatever he’d had with Sollux shifted into what Karkat cryptically called “Something Else.” 

It hadn’t helped, either, that Sollux had become the kind of palemate Feferi had no fucking chance of finding in Eridan.

And it _extra_ hadn’t helped that Sollux wasn’t even a little sorry.

Whatever Sollux and Eridan had going by that point apparently involved Gamzee texting over pictures of Eridan all smeary with engine grease and trying really hard to look like he didn’t give a fuck about anything.  Among other mysterious things, to be motherfucking sure.

They’d figure it out when they got there.  Didn’t sound like the  _worst_  plan Gamzee had ever heard.

“Kar agreed to do it,” Eridan said.  “He’d want you to help me, you _know_ he would.”    

And that was kind of the last motherfucking straw, you know?  Straw all stinky and crinkled on the floor of a carnival freak show.   

Gamzee asked Equius to message him right when Karkat got back – Equius declared that he would, or else let him be subjugglated something motherfucking strict.  Strung up from the grief trapeze in pieces, or whatever the fuck.  It was kind of hard to hear him through the blowtorch mask.  And the sounds of the actual blowtorch. 

Eridan whined to hurry up, so Gamzee did.  


	5. So, is this guy happy to see us or not?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so from this chapter on there's Sollux all over the place. :P Sorry about that~~! (I came back to edit this note 'cause I realized it might've sounded like there wasn't Sollux in this chapter... I promise, there IS Sollux in this chapter. He speaks!!) 
> 
> A few other things:  
> 1\. I got the train station from a piece of Hiveswap concept art! So, not my idea, but I was really interested to know that Alternia has trains.  
> 2\. The Very Potter Musical is not mine, either. :)  
> 3\. Sorry about Troll Steam.
> 
> Have a great day! Thanks for your patience with me.

Riding the train into Sollux’s city was about as magical as Gamzee had always hoped, but Eridan told him he really had to stop saying that or he couldn't be held responsible for what happened next.  The world had rushed by like a movie put on fast-forward.  Buildings had gone from one scattered here and there, like Gamzee’s on the grey beach or Equius’s along the cliffside, to appearing in motherfucking clumps.  Like they were leaning in to talk, some kind of building-family.  And then they got fucking _huge_ , spitting smoke like they were dragons or some shit.  Angry cartoon characters, with steam coming out of their motherfucking ears. 

The two of them turned out to be a lot older than most of the other trolls slumped around the train station and holding spiny, half-living security bars on the train itself.  All the wigglers seemed so small for the world they had to keep running, with the adults out colonizing one motherfucking world after another and always having to move right on.  Gamzee had to duck or else he’d have scraped up the top of the train with his horns.  It was pretty obvious to everyone that they would be going off-planet soon.  A few fellow clowns – in neck ruffles and striped rainbow sleeves so long they dragged on the ground, in big fluffy Pierrot buttons and jagged jester paint – called out some encouraging stuff as Gamzee walked by.  That he’d be joining the divine murder circus soon, and not waiting around like they were.  That they could tell he’d subjugglate the ever-living shit out of the Grand Highblood’s enemies, out of the unholy motherfuckers that deserved whatever gory carnival was coming to their interstellar town.  He’d play cat’s cradle with intestines, brother.  He’d paint the wicked righteous mysteries on the wall in every flavor of blood.

Gamzee waved, and called back, and wondered if these other Subjugglators-in-training liked the parts of the doctrine he’d been happiest to find, from before the Grand Highblood sold them all to this latest Empress.  The parts about all trolls as equal, all blood as the same.  _“All up on one rock, bleeding as equals.”_   The parts about brotherhood meaning more than the blood itself ever could.  Maybe they did.  He wanted to believe that they did.

Eridan called dibs on one of the few chairs in their compartment – he’d pulled Ahab’s Crosshairs on a group of fellow pirate-y sorts still dripping salt water all over the place.  And then he chuckled, “Yeah, that’s fuckin right!” and sat with his legs crossed, his fingers steepled like some villain in a movie.  He met Gamzee’s eyes and smiled ruefully, and Gamzee felt like they were on the same fucking side for sure.  He smiled back, all lopsided and staring, trying to take in the train and the strangers and the endless movement, all of it.  Of course there _had_ to be a lot of trolls on Alternia, but it had always just been Gamzee and the empty ocean, before.  Gamzee and the people he met over his computer.      

First the train rattled through moonlight, and then a million streaks of neon, and then they ground to another stop and Eridan yanked Gamzee out and into the world. 

The city was a fucking miracle.  It was also a maze.  There were near-identical buildings crammed in next to near-identical buildings, with streets looping in knots between them.  Stuff sloshed in the gutters and stained the apartment walls – electric light dyed everything in all kinds of fantastical colors.  Gamzee shouldn’t have stood gaping, though.  People were trying to get out around him, off to interesting places.  Jobs, maybe.  Gamzee had never needed to hold a job, not outside of his priesthood to come, but you know…  It had never really clicked for him how _someone_ had to run the train.  Someone had to keep everybody else’s lights going.

Eridan scooted Gamzee over to the side of the doorway, so he couldn’t block the motherfucking road anymore.  Gamzee blinked, dizzy in all the lights, the distant laughter, distant screaming.  Almost too much was fucking _happening_ , and it was amazing, sure.  Sure, it was amazing.

“Okay, so here’s what we know: Sol ain’t respondin to my messages,” Eridan declared.  “An also he lives in a communal hive stem that’s green an blocky.  Ugly as sin.  He has to keep his lusus on top, because it’s too big to fit inside.”

“So…  I guess we walk around?” Gamzee suggested.  “Look for where the buildings get green.”

“Well, yeah,” Eridan agreed.  “After we get fancy city drinks.”

They got fancy city drinks.  Gamzee had no fucking idea what anything on the menu was, but whatever he got was drowning in whipped cream and carbonation _both_ so it was perfect.  The poor kid behind the counter definitely thought either of them would kill her, only a matter of time.  But then they wandered away and checked out some stores.  She could breathe again, and they got to look at weapons.  Board games.  Interesting clown hats, some with bones sewn in with the jester bells.  Coats with knock-knock jokes spelled out on the back and meant to look like they were dripping blood.

“Knock-knock,” Gamzee asked Eridan, reading off one of the coats.  He waggled his eyebrows.

“No,” Eridan responded. 

Gamzee took a picture of the back of the jacket to show Karkat when he got back to the ship.  Karkat might groan and tease, sure – he might think of some creative new insults, sometimes, though less now than he did when they were wigglers.  But he nearly always let Gamzee finish his jokes. 

There were a few weird encounters before they found Sollux’s communal hive stem.  First off was the time they saw a _different_ lusus up on the top of an apartment building, and Eridan insisted they climb all the way up the drain pipes and whatever when no one would buzz them up.  It was fucking hard – Gamzee’s oversize clown shoe slipped once or twice, and he had to blink away swaying stars before he kept on going.  The lusus turned out to be a hungry raptor, anyway, waiting for some sick and hive-less trolls to wander by on the street below.  They’d gotten the fuck out of there fast, even if Eridan _was_ muttering about how he’d have fed that thing to Feferi’s lusus easy, a while back. 

Next was when they thought they saw Sollux’s matesprit Aradia and had ended up following – and really freaking out – some random stranger who’d only been trying to buy groceries.  Gamzee had had a lot of awkward conversations in his life, but that…  That was motherfucking _something_.  He’d walked away trying to laugh about it, but Eridan had had his face in his hands, blushing bright, rich violet all through.

Eventually, though, they did find the right green, apparently “ugly as sin” communal hive stem.  It had half of Sollux’s name sign up above it – “Captor,” it shouted down to the street below.  Kind of.  If you knew to look for it.  There was a two-headed lusus tied to that sign, too, bellowing something Gamzee could barely hear and sparking at the eyes.  Those sparks looked like they’d burn right through a troll who got too close.

Eridan had Gamzee push the buzzer and ask Sollux to let him up.  Sollux was all, “Oh hey, GZ.  What’re you doing here?” in that brisk, nasally way of his, like he was just glancing up from one of his many screens or Beehouse Mainframes to raise an eyebrow at some new question before going about his business. 

Then Eridan had hissed, “Tell him you just wanna ‘motherfuckin chill’ or whatever, it doesn’t matter.  Just passin through.  God, we should’ve rehearsed this…”

And then Sollux was like, “Oh.  Shit.  It’s _you_.”  

“Hello, Sol,” Eridan huffed.  He was looking down his nose at the radio box, as if Sollux could actually see him.  “Let us up, _now_.  The street’s reel-y fuckin gross out here.”

“Hey,” Gamzee said.  Answering back to Sollux’s original “hey,” but by that point…  By that point, yeah, he was kind of along for the ride.                         

  Sollux’s actual hive was built out of the green stem itself, hanging over the street and buzzing with living red and blue wires.  They were threaded all over the place, hooked up to a bunch of machines Gamzee didn’t motherfucking recognize.  Everything seemed alive, oozing mind honey and magical red and blue colored sopor – Gamzee’d always wondered what that shit would taste like baked into a pie, but it wasn’t like Sollux was going to send him any in a fucking jar.  He thought about maybe snagging some of Sollux’s sopor that night, as he slumped against one of the walls, listening to sirens through the window, to the buzzing of mind honey bees flying in close to inspect his hair.  But really, trying _not_ to listen to the weird whisper-fight Sollux and Eridan were having over by the doorway.  Shoulders were shoved a little.  Capes were tugged, threatening to get torn.

It was kind of hard not to listen, after a point.  Sorry, guys.

“Aren’t you happy to see us?” Eridan wheedled, his smile all kinds of pointed, his back straight as a shot from Ahab’s Crosshairs.  He’d swished his cape back, planted a cocky hand on his hip.

“I told you I was taking the train to Terezi’s for the thing,” Sollux answered. 

“It’ll be better to come with us, Sol.  Obviously.  We’re goin on _adventures_.”

“I don’t like adventures – I like getting my work done, and only occasionally going to see bizarrely clown-themed eclipses with my friends.”

“Would you almost say you…  You might _hate_ adventures?”  Eridan’s pose slipped a little, when he said that bit.  He slumped forward just a little, as if the fact that they’d been wandering around a smoky city for hours was finally catching up with him.  His eyes were a little soft, Gamzee thought, behind his blocky hipster shades.

Then Sollux sighed, and slumped back over to his desk.  Gamzee noticed he had a plastic-y nametag on, then – one of Eridan’s “City Drink” stores they’d just swung by, actually.  “Fuck you, ED,” he said.  At first his expression was a little hard to read, but then – but _then_ – Gamzee saw he was trying not to laugh.  He swiped a hand under his shades, rubbing at his crackling red/blue eyes.  They were deep pits of light, with no wetness, no meat at all.  The room was full of scribbles, hieroglyphs in his signature red and blue.  Lots of motherfucking beautiful designs all crossed out – _everything_ was crossed out, by the time Gamzee studied it, there, except one phrase right in the center of the ceiling.  _“AA 2ay2 iit’2 not thii2 tiimeliine.”_   Huh.  Fucking weird, but maybe some kind of art whatever?  Super smart computer-y whatever? 

Gamzee didn’t need to get it.

“I definitely _hate_ how…  Shit.  I hate how you think you can just come in here and change all my plans.  I hate how you think you can sweep me off my fucking feet like this is one of KK’s stupid rom-coms.  I hate how…” 

“Yes?”

“I hate how I know you’re just trying to, I don’t know, fucking hang out with me…  So it’s like _I’m_ the asshole if I get mad.”         

Eridan actually, giggled, then.  It was a wavery, high-pitched sound, a little like whoever played the Boy Wizard’s rival in “A Very Boy Wizard Musical.”  He bunched his delicate, tapered fingers up by his mouth and relaxed a little, resting his back against Sollux’s wall.  He smeared some of the red and blue writings onto his back – Sollux saw, and didn’t say anything. 

Sollux hesitated, sat down at his desk…  Fiddled with his husktop a little.  Typed something Gamzee didn’t read.  Eridan waited, swinging back and forth on his heels. 

“You really want me to come,” Sollux said, after a minute.  He didn’t look up, didn’t stop typing.

“It’ll be fun, Sol,” Eridan offered.  He said it in the same voice he’d used to tell Feferi he missed her, in the long, long messages he’d left while sitting beside Gamzee on the beach.  Then he tried to pick it up a little, swishing his cape back again.  “ _Dashin adventure,_ though.  What’s not to love – _or_ hate?”

“Oh, shut up,” said Sollux.  But by that point, everyone pretty much knew he was going to come with them. 

Later – after Sollux had called his work and begged off sick, after he told Gamzee Karkat would kill him if he handed over a new and different sopor despite their whole “Get Gamzee off that Shit” plan – they left.  Sollux and Eridan bickered about shit Feferi’d been saying over Troll Steam on the way back to the train and their ship, to Karkat and Equius and whatever had gone down on the beach.  Gamzee would’ve bet genuine special stardust that a lot of it was just fucking made up to get Eridan’s goat.  They bickered about where Sollux was going to sleep on the ship – either dangled behind them all on a rope or curled up under the engine, apparently.  They bickered about whose fault it was that Gamzee was the one who got them un-lost in the train station…  Gamzee, who was notoriously bad at finding shit.  _Gamzee_. 

Gamzee just laughed and shook his head, at that.  “You guys are fucking adorable.”

The fact that they were definitely not adorable was something, at least, that Eridan and Sollux could agree on.


	6. Did you know I've never heard you laugh like this before?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey!!~ :) Thanks so much for reading, and I hope you enjoy this! Some... Sightseeing. Also random made-up landmarks! It remains self-serving and full of sappy moments, and it was a lot of fun to write. Thanks for sticking with the story! Sorry, as always, if I got any details wrong.
> 
> I remembered what I wanted to add here! Gamzee's painting on his hive wall -- I got that imagery from Summerteen Romance, the Paradox Space comic. :O I based it off that sand castle Gamzee's making the whole time. There.

Gamzee tried not to stare at Nepeta as she hugged Karkat goodbye, but he could see her eyes were shot with heavy green and very soft.  He thought she had probably been crying more recently than she’d want anyone to know.  But her hands lingered when rubbing Karkat’s back, all the same – she smiled so one of her little catlike fangs stuck over her lip.  They were still friends, Karkat would tell Gamzee later, hunched over his husktop, headphones on like a shield.  He’d sigh and wiggle his toes in his thick, black socks.  He’d toss his head, gesturing to the spot next to him on the floor of their ship’s respite block.  Gamzee would flop down next to him, becoming a kind of pillow while Karkat watched a movie he couldn’t hear.  They were still friends.  Despite what Karkat knew was coming, probably.  Despite what he didn’t think he could offer anybody at all.    

It hadn’t taken Equius very long to fix their ship, in the end.  Karkat and Nepeta had come back from their walk and been like, _“Oh, so Eridan went to go drag his kismesis into things even though ‘Kar’ couldn’t help.  Hooray?”_ And then they’d all awkwardly fussed with the ship’s insides for a while, cleaning off salt and blood and – in Equius’s case – trying not to break too much of their shit.  Equius had sent Gamzee a whole horn-pile of messages about it, apparently.  Once, it probably would’ve ticked Karkat off to find out his moirail’s mobile husktop had been accidentally on silent.  Part of Gamzee’s thinkpan was already chanting at him that he was useless and disappointing, like a toy that ran out of batteries a long time ago. 

Now, though, Karkat just hissed a little laughter through his teeth.  Not a real laugh, no.  But something.  Enough to shut Gamzee’s thinkpan up for a while.  It was always a goal of his, to make Karkat laugh.  He _was_ a clown, after all.

Equius and Nepeta waved them goodbye from the beach, lit by the rising sun, by the fading seashell lamps.  That sun was a bright and bleeding red over the ocean.   Karkat’s red.   The self-proclaimed “meow-rails” would have to find someplace to sleep, soon.  Their own ship or whatever probably wasn’t too far away.

“See you in a couple nights!” Nepeta trilled.  She couldn’t have been any less tired than before, but Gamzee thought it was sweet how she tried for the cutesy voice all the same.  She pumped her arm over her head, waving and waving until they were out of sight…  Or, at least that’s what Gamzee motherfucking figured.  Waving until he stopped looking anymore, you know.

Scrolling back through Equius’s sea of sharp, increasingly frustrated messages, Gamzee realized something he thought was probably important.  No matter what else he was – no matter how he intentionally pounded Gamzee’s buttons with his shatteringly strong fists, trying to goad him into the rage of his blood – Equius must have cared at least a little about getting him back to help his moirail.  He knew about being pale for someone, his messages said; he knew Gamzee wanted to do his best at this, and at friendship in general, even if he’d let so much of his own life slide by.  Neglected the duties and inheritance of his fizzing grape-soda blood, and all its wicked motherfucking chucklevoodoos.

There was a little respect there, Gamzee thought.  Through it all – through what Gamzee couldn’t understand, through what blood caste stupidness Equius clung to despite the plans they were all making.   Maybe.  And for something other than his fucking blood, too. 

The last thing he saw of Equius as they left was a tentative almost-smile, or maybe a trick of the light.  

Gamzee took first flying shift, ‘cause he knew all those motherfucking controls pretty well by then.  He wore giant polka-dot sunglasses, and when Karkat saw him slip them on he went, “Pffft.”  Sunglasses mission, motherfucking _accomplished_.

There was something peaceful about flying the skies of Alternia during the day, through a grayish sun-proof window, wearing enormous clown shades.  Sure – a lot of the scarier lusii were out hunting, and that involved some piloting into hiding spots and fucking _waiting_ , Equius’s newly-installed extra weapons systems primed.  But it also involved drifting by some strangers’ ships and waving at them, a big goofy smile on, because they were both out in the middle of the day, both taking the late shift.  It was kind of like being friends, almost. 

Gamzee ended up waving at some yellow blood beekeeper type, piloting a ship full of brain-sizzling honey – she frowned at him until eventually raising up a hand that was more a question mark than anything.  He waved at two blue bloods who looked like they were hatched from the same egg, both dripping sharp metal jewelry and with matching tattooed monsters going up their arms.  One of them blew him a kiss, and then the other laughed, covering their mouth with a leather gloved hand.         

Eventually, Sollux took over, nudging Gamzee out of the pilot’s spot and saying he better go sleep before Eridan woke up and started making everybody play his dumb strategy board game again.  He was wearing Eridan’s scarf, by that point, which he said he’d won in a “Fair Battle.”  Karkat would later say that “Battle” must have involved a lot of weird kissing and throwing each other up against the wall of the respite block, because he’d had to “wash his face” for a _long fucking time_ before it had been okay to go down there.

As Gamzee ate less and less sopor, his nightmares had gotten motherfucking _weird_.  That day, he dreamt about crawling through a vent system maze where there wasn’t any end – he had to hold his chest together long enough to get out of the ridiculous fucking labyrinth, but he wasn’t sure doing that was even possible.  His insides had been sloppily stitched back up by someone he was pretty sure was his ancestor – also impossible –  but slimy, soda-fizzing bits of him kept falling out so he’d have to stop and stuff them back inside.  Whenever he froze too long, he started to notice his face reflected back in the shiny metal of the vent.  His eyes were huge and blue and plastic-y looking, there.  Not really his eyes at all.

Motherfucking _stupid_ dream.  Gamzee woke up breathing heavy, arms tight around his guts.  It was wonderful to drag himself out into the waking world and find everybody else already there, breakfast shit lying around and getting gloppy in half-eaten bowls.  The night was dark and wide around them – they were flying over a yawning field, by that point, with nothing but a hive pockmarked here and there to mark the space.  Karkat said they were almost to wherever they were going, and the skies were empty enough that he’d put the ship on autopilot.

“I watched Sollux kick Eridan’s ass at that game with all the fucking ships,” Karkat said.  “It was beautiful.  He threw one of his tiny coins at Sollux’s head, and then got all pouty when it got lost.”

“The thing’s fuckin shiny,” Eridan protested.  “Really, we _should_ be able to find it in here!”  He paused, poking at a cup of very sweetened troll coffee.  “I’m still not completely convinced Sol isn’t hidin it in his pockets.”

“Yes, because I’d definitely do that.”  Sollux made a face, lips getting scrunched up against his mismatched, over-long fangs.  Gamzee could see yellow-ish scar tissue along the inside of his lips, from where those fangs had cut him up while trying to talk, before.  “Oh, such a fucking immature and hilarious prankster I am.”

They went on for a while – Karkat watched his movie and thought about Nepeta, you know.  Gamzee practiced being the troll version of a pillow, messing around with card tricks and muttering the honk-chorus from one of his favorite songs.  Eridan eventually insisted on checking all Sollux’s pockets for his missing coin – which Sollux truly, truly didn’t have.  (It was in the teeny space between the collapsible table’s leg and the floor.  Equius would find it later.  Much later.) 

So that’s about how it was – until they almost hit into the side of a cliff, of course.  After freaking out for what he would consider a very appropriate amount of time, _thanks for asking_ , Karkat decreed they were finally there.

Everyone agreed it had been Eridan’s turn to drive when they all might have died _that_ time, except for Eridan.  Gamzee couldn’t remember when that had ever been officially decided, but hey.  What the motherfuck did he know about piloting schedules?

Anyway, the cliff in question was part of the place’s motherfucking point.  They’d hike over some rocky hills, taking in the glory of what Karkat called “shiny dirt” and “weird plants that were probably poisonous,” and then they’d check out a cave.  And not just _any_ cave, but a cave the Empress had mined for her own personal jewelry for generations.  Anything left was shit she’d turned down, heaped all around and probably costing a bunch of lives.  It glittered all the way through inside once you got deep enough, Karkat assured everyone.  Like walking into a crystal forest where the whole sky was also just heavy, oppressive crystal, and no rains fell.  Everything that tried living there would fucking die.  Try and tunnel up to the sky, and you’d get swallowed up by a dark so complete you wouldn’t even care how expensive it was.     

“Motherfuck,” Gamzee said.  “Sounds _magical_.”

“So, a nature hike,” Sollux said.  “You’re using what would be an actual wall of text just to tell us we’re going on a nature hike.”

And yeah, it was definitely a motherfucking nature hike, but that wasn’t a _bad_ thing.  Eridan chipped off shiny pieces of the wall and stuffed them in a pristine leather satchel.  Gamzee brought a picnic where only a little, little bit of the food had sopor in it, and which had involved trying out a seadweller recipe they’d had in Eridan’s douchey fish bar a few nights before.  (Eridan said it was, “Fine, but nothing to write Fef about,” before glaring really intently at Sollux, who was like, “Wow, ED.  This again?”)  

Karkat took pictures of absolutely everything.  At first, Gamzee’d noticed that just as a cute little aside, like, _“Lookit how motherfucking intense he gets, bent all up next to a flower.  Like it’s gonna try and run away.”_   But then he noticed Karkat taking quiet, awkward pictures of all his friends, only when he didn’t think they were looking.  When Karkat asked for a group shot, Gamzee nudged Eridan until he shut up about not having had time to style his hair right that evening.  He tried to offer up a smile that didn’t look even a little bit sad, but…  Fuck, he probably didn’t get it right, that time. 

When they were deep inside the Empress’s jewelry cave, Karkat got everyone to stop and perch on jagged, glittering bits of wall.  Kinda uncomfortable, but even Eridan did it, panning a flashlight around the walls like natural-born gemstone chandeliers, like faces forming out of rock and thousands upon thousands of sweeps.  Karkat passed around heavy troll sketchbooks, then, with the kind of thick, buttery paper Gamzee’d only used a few times.  He had a bunch of mostly unbroken troll pencils, too, he said.  Maybe everyone could try sketching the place.  He’d gotten the idea from a book. 

Sollux pointed out that probably the people in that book had been able to draw, you know, _well_.  But he did it anyway, scribbling a stick figure labeled, “me ii gue22” right in the middle of the swirly loops and sparkly spikes that were supposed to be the rest of the room.  Eridan reached over and drew a misshapen stalactite on Sollux’s page, stretching all the way down to impale him.  _That_ resulted in Eridan getting his notebook psionic-ed away and almost torn to little pieces…  Until he reminded Sollux that the thing actually belonged to Karkat.

It wasn’t something Gamzee talked about a lot, but he did genuinely love to paint.  He’d done up the walls of his respite block, once, even.  Before his shipment of Troll Jokers Cards posters had come in.  He’d painted glittering multicolored oceans, back then, and castles decked out with juggling clowns, with a dozen loopy smiling faces each.  Well, sort of.  He’d been a wiggler.  But he’d imagined all that shit, dabbing his hands in the paint jars and smearing them around to get the colors wild and right.

So when he drew Karkat, Gamzee made sure to try and do his face nice.  He smoothed out some of the acne scars Karkat wouldn’t want to think about – he caught him in a really motherfucking pensive moment, too.  Just looking at the drawing, a brother might not even guess Karkat had just crumpled up multiple sketches of his own and tossed them off into the cave. 

Gamzee hadn’t even gotten around to drawing any motherfucking crystals by the time Karkat asked everyone to pass him their drawings so he could fold them back together in his bag.  Save them.  He didn’t say what for.

“Dammit, Gamzee,” Karkat sighed.  His face was juggling between _“flattered”_ and _“wondering if Gamzee had actually missed the point.”_ “You were supposed to draw the, you know.  The fucking cave.”

Gamzee shrugged.  Smiled in a way he thought might be kinda mysterious, but that made Karkat wrinkle his nose and say, “Okay, stop it, asshole.”  It wasn’t like he was sorry – he’d been getting to the cave, brother. 

It would be fair to say Gamzee had _no motherfucking idea_ where they really were until they climbed back up out of the Empress’s jewelry cave depths and out through the tourist-y exit on the other side.  In retrospect, he really should have noticed the slow chant building up, drifting through the mountain’s heavy stone skin.  He might have even recognized the song, if he’d listened well enough…  If he’d thought to be listening for a fucking wicked hymn out there at all.  Eridan said _he_ recognized it, later, because he’d only had to listen to it five million times while Gamzee was driving.       

They ducked out through the exit and shoved some money into a slot so the bar would open, and then…  Bam.  Just a few more steps, and then a giant field, with more clown trolls than Gamzee had ever seen before.  They were shuffling forward, gathered around something Gamzee couldn’t see yet.  Karkat didn’t seem nervous, or like he was half expecting some sort of highblood flip out or another.  The world was chill, there.  The place was the kind of holy that meant motherfucking reverence, not the kind of organ-juggling mania other Mirthful Church services preached.

Some of the clown trolls had Faygo bottles swinging in their claws; some of them were being carried up on giant almost full-grown highblood shoulders, so everyone would get a chance to see soon enough.  Family.  Kind of like a giant Messiahs-blessed family.  A guy with long strands of rainbow yarn for hair and a shiny purple rubber nose on waved to Gamzee without even being motherfucking waved at first. 

“This is…  The Jestprophet’s Show?”  Gamzee asked, leaning forward, listening for the grinding of distant gears, for the juggling of mechanical, crystalline pins.  The rattling out of prophesies that would be stitched into new hymn-raps probably even just that night.  He knew his mouth was hanging open, but it took a few long seconds to close it.

“Of course it is,” Karkat snorted.  Gamzee hadn’t heard him laugh so softly, not that he could remember.  Tender.  Teasing.  “I can do the pale-romantic thing too, you know.  Obviously.”

“Oh shit,” Gamzee said.  Karkat pushed him forward a little, told him to make the trip worth it.  To listen to some bullshit prophesies and be vapidly wide-eyed amazed just for him.    


	7. Does every ancient battlefield get a fuck ton of golden statues, then?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hiiiiii~ Thanks again for sticking with the story! :D Today we have a little more sightseeing, as well as some thoughts about Sollux and Eridan getting to know each other better. I tried to get details right.  
> And next up is the actual eclipse! It's only the thing in the title, ahahaha. I hope I do it justice!
> 
> A couple things, again:  
> 1\. I'm really proud of that name, Liacci Bozozo... Pfffft. "Liacci" is from "Pagliacci," like in Rorschach's joke in "Watchmen." But anyway, that's where I got that!  
> 2\. Yeah... They're all kind of playing Troll "Injustice". I really enjoy playing those games with people, and I thought... Idk, it'd be something homey. (Troll Injustice lets you play with 3+ people per match, I guess. And the rules are different... It's a lot more CHAOS than regular Injustice. I wonder why I'm putting so much thought into this?)

The last place they stopped before having to make a sharp, sharp right and racing to Terezi’s hive – “So fucking behind schedule,” as Karkat kept saying – was the spot where Vriska’s ancestor had died.  Supposedly.  Most of the statues there were of the Condesce, of course, because she wasn’t exactly the kind of terrifying galactic empress who _wanted_ rebels to get celebrated and/or immortalized in gold. 

There was the Condesce smirking out at the empty field, now heavy with flowers, with a cold mist that meant everybody’d want to buy souvenir battlefield hoodies.  (Which Karkat actually did.)  There was the Condesce with her trident held high over her head, smiting somebody who’d been sculpted out of lesser materials and was now rusting to a flaky pulp.  There was a little snack stand, selling “ancient battlefield”-themed foods.  There were more of those than Gamzee would’ve motherfucking expected – cupcakes with mini candy tridents stuck in them, bags of popcorn flecked with different colors and meant to look like they’d gotten all blood-splattered. 

But mostly everyone in their little group took pictures of the same thing, and it wasn’t one of those Condesce-es staring down from everywhere.  It was something Eridan showed them, shoving his clunky glasses up onto his head to get a closer look. 

“Such a fucking history nerd,” Sollux snickered at him.  But then he leaned down to look, too.

There was a picture carved into one of the statue’s bases, see, supposedly right over the spot where the Summoner had stabbed Marquise Spinneret Mindfang through the middle.  Cerulean blood would’ve splattered up the Summoner’s arms, brother, cold to the touch and hundreds of sweeps old, like the still, slow stuff in dusty bottles.  Trapped in a cellar and never opened; grown changed by wild time, by pirate lace and blood and centuries of salt water.  Her face would have twisted into a knowing smile, Vriska said, even as she died.  She had known this was coming.  And then she’d trickle away, and be gone.  After living as a monster and then a revolutionary, after bringing so much pain and then trying with all her ancient motherfucking self to bring justice instead.  Dead as the universe after the Vast Honk to come.

The picture itself was…  Scratchy.  Kind of hard to make out, though Karkat said it wasn’t any worse than one of Sollux’s drawings.  (Sollux said his sparkly cave sketch had been beautiful, and Karkat was lucky to have it.  Karkat told him, “ _Shhh_.”)  The carving was supposedly of the Summoner doing his stabbing thing and Mindfang kicking the wicked motherfucking shit.  _Also_ supposedly, it kept reappearing whenever the Condesce returned, saw it, and had the whole fucking statue replaced.  The only thing really clear about the image was the Sufferer’s sign – those twin burning shackles crossed, like Karkat wore on his shirt.  Like they all knew Terezi carried defiantly around her neck. 

Gamzee took a bunch of pictures of that shit, and sent the less-blurry ones to Tavros.  “WiSh YoU cOuLd’Ve BeEn HeRe, BrO,” he wrote. 

Tavros sent back some emoticons with wide open O-s for mouths, said he wished so, too.  He was supposed to be meeting up with Aradia about then, playing tabletop Team Charge shit since he hadn’t been running around, going up against assholes like Vriska anymore.  Not since his spine got broke.  Aradia had sent Sollux some cute pictures of them hanging out with Tavros’s lusus, lately, along with hatching new and exceptionally rare Fiduspawn.  Aradia was the best at those fine motherfucking goofy captions, it had to be said.

A long time ago, Gamzee’d asked Tavros if he wanted to make out a little.  Tav had never responded to that, and it had been a few nights before Gamzee’d worked up the motherfucking nerve to message him again.  But maybe that meant Gamzee knew a little of what Nepeta was thinking a couple nights back, when she’d hugged Karkat tight even while her eyes probably still burned from crying.  Sometimes a person would always mean a hell of a lot more than any of that relationship shit.  Gamzee sent Tavros a close-up of what was probably the scribble-Summoner’s face, wrote, “i DoN’t ThInk ThIs MoThErFuCkEr LoOkS tOo MuCh LiKe YoU,” and waited to see if Tavros would type a little laugh.

(He did.  When Karkat saw Gamzee smiling loopily down at his messages, he was all, “Tavros, right?”  That motherfucker could read Gamzee’s face like a fucking rom-com novel.)

Eridan kept busy lecturing everybody about the history of the battlefield the whole time, of course.  He was pulling out random names and pacing around, saying shit like “Seerah Jaiice died here,” or, “And _then_ the Empress’s Laughsassin General Liacci Bozozo would have swept in this-a-way – he had a Slinky weaponized in his strife specibus at the time, which is a lot more glubbin terrifyin than it sounds…”

Eventually, Sollux accused Eridan of making up some of the names he kept whipping out of nowhere, and Eridan demanded they all go buy a proper guidebook and he’d prove Sol _wrong_. 

He did, in fact, prove Sol wrong.  He was so fucking smug, when they headed back to the ship.  That may’ve been part of why Sollux was kneading at his temples around then, eyes sparking with an angry, painful light that couldn’t completely be held back by his shades.  But that couldn’t have been all of it.  A headache, Sollux said.  Worse than his usual, _constant_ , brain-stomping headache. 

“Are the voices of the dyin louder around historic battlegrounds, then?” Eridan asked.  He was leaning close, a hand fluttering around Sollux’s shoulders like he wasn’t really sure whether he should try holding him.  A kismesis, offering up a little comfort, hopeful as a prayer to the twofold messiahs.  When Eridan had tried that shit on Vriska it’d never ended well for him.

“Wouldn’t know,” Sollux snapped.  “First time going anywhere so fucking ‘historic.’  And it’s not like this was even my idea.” 

“We’re leavin now, so it’ll be –”

“Stop.  _You_ brought me here, ED.  That’s what I was trying to say.”

They didn’t see Sollux again until later – he’d hidden away after sweeping everyone with a biting electric glare.  He had a few sharp words to smear around like explosive mind honey on toast.  About himself, about everybody.  Karkat told Eridan not to follow him down into the respite block.  Give him a little space, and he’d come back when he felt up to it.  None of them could really imagine what all Sollux’s brain threw at him sometimes.  He’d had a battleship-shaped cloud hovering over him his whole life, ready to swoop in and claim his will.  Claim his brittle, lanky bones, claim his mind with all its pain and its voices and restless energy.  He had known he would be wired up into something awful, something beyond himself, ever since he’d learned his own name.  The Condesce would treat him like part of the ship.  His commanding officers would treat him like part of the ship, too.  

Every time his head hurt, wouldn’t Sollux be reminded of what was coming for him?

Gamzee thought about his friends’ plans, again – he tried to see them through Sollux’s eyes.  If they worked, then great.  Of course, great.  If they didn’t, would he be culled?  Or used up like a battery?  Honestly, which would be worse?

“He’ll come back,” Karkat told Eridan.  He shrugged, chewed on the inside of his lip a little.  “Just find other shit to do.  Wait for him.  Be nice, or something…  Ah, I’m sure you get the idea – you’re not a _total_ idiot.”

And Sollux _did_ come back.  It was after they’d been flying for a while, Karkat at the helm again and Gamzee trying out some of his newly-learned card tricks on Eridan. 

(Cards went motherfucking everywhere, at one point, but as long as Gamzee admitted he knew they weren’t _actually_ magic Eridan was game for pretty much anything.  Card tricks were a little like juggling.  It all came down to a quickness, a coquettish tilt of the wrist that Gamzee had failed at for fucking sweeps.  Now, his hands weren’t so motherfucking sluggish, like he was always moving in water.  Now, Eridan could pull a card out from inside his fucking shoe and be like, “Dammit, Gam, that shouldn’t be possible.”  A Subjugglator could move ninja-quick, sometimes, just a shadow out of the corner of an unfunny motherfucker’s eye.  Gamzee wasn’t quite there yet, but he’d been trying his whole life.)

Gamzee was actually trying to convince Eridan that he should give riding his unicycle a shot – even in that cramped ship-space, even having to weave around Equius’s muscular-horse man table and his own giant Grand Highblood-ish throne – when Sollux padded back up from the respite block.  He had a tangle of red and blue wires wrapped up his wrist, and a game system folded under his arm.  There were bits of sleeping-sopor clumped in his hair.  No one was surprised when he admitted he’d had a long talk with Aradia, picking apart all the death he heard, reaching for her manic smile and super-blunt warmth.  Well, he didn’t say all that, really, but Gamzee filled in the motherfucking gaps like slime oozing to fill a pie tin.

Aradia’d said ancient battlefields were pretty intense with her ghost-powers, too.  She’d said Sollux could maybe stand to let Eridan into his head, sometimes – like right then, actually – because they were in a quadrant of _some_ kind and it was important to trust each other.  Things had gotten steadily worse for Sollux at the battlefield, and Aradia was pretty sure Eridan would’ve wanted to know.  Wanted to help.

“She’s right.  I want to understand…” Eridan said, in a warm and helpless voice.  Before he remembered the playful rules of their hatemance, and added, “God, Sol.  Have a little more faith in someone willin to give the best of his pitch to you.  Fuckin hell.”    

Gamzee probably wasn’t supposed to hear that last part.  Or, you know.  Any of it.  

“Do you guys want to play a game where we beat each other up as superheroes?” Sollux asked.  It sounded like his head still hurt pretty bad, but maybe not _so_ much like a thousand needles were trying to tap-dance all over it.  His smile was exhausted.  There were probably so many things he was trying not to think about.  How much of Sollux’s life had he lived like that?  Putting on a sarcastic face instead of freaking the fuck out, knowing what Her Imperious Condescension had planned for him.

“Sure,” Eridan said.  He didn’t correct the word to “shore,” even.

And basically, they were all motherfucking destiny-bound to play until Eridan won a match, at that point.  Sollux ended up scooting in nice and close to him, his bony shoulder jutting into Eridan’s arm, snickering about how fucking awful he was at getting his special move buttons pressed in time.  Eridan was hunched up and sitting on his cape, glowering at the screen with his cheeks flushed violet.  But he was smiling, too.  A carnivorous, hunter’s smile.  It didn’t have quite the same effect while he was sipping soda…  (Not Faygo, but some other thing with a fancy fucking name brewed all special and underwater…)  Instead of poised at the front of a pirate ship with his ancestor’s giant gun hoisted over his shoulder.  Eridan had chip crumbs at the corner of his lip, and everything.      

Gamzee won  _this_  game a couple times, actually.  He wasn’t honestly sure how to activate any special moves – he just pressed whatever felt right, and shit happened.  At least they had a clown-themed character.  Exploding pies were the fucking _shit_.

Everything was probably back to whatever their “normal” was, by the time Sollux was simultaneously lying slumped over to rest his head on Eridan’s chest and taunting him by tossing his character into the sun over, and over, and over. Like on a motherfucking trampoline.  Eridan was a comfort, a distraction.  Sollux laughed all scratchy in his throat, and no light was crackling out from behind his glasses.

Gamzee’s character was just frozen at the bottom of the screen by that point, swinging a rubber chicken around like he was aiming for an invisible somebody’s jaw.  He was watching the flesh-sizzling animation, actually.  That shit was kind of beautifully done.   

And then the ship's in-flight screen went blank, for a second, and Sollux swore, and the game got replaced by a giant Trollian page.  It was signed in as Karkat, and Terezi was typing them a message.

“What the hell, Kar?” Eridan called.  No answer. 

“WH3R3 4R3 YOU GUYS? >:[” Terezi sent.  “HURRY UP!  1F 1 H4V3 TO G3T R34DY BY MYS3LF W3’R3 4LL 34T1NG PL41N GRUB S4UC3 4ND NOTH1NG 3LS3.”

“We’re almost there!” Karkat offered from the front of the ship.  He was turned in his seat, smirking back at them.  Leader-mode.  Gamzee kind of pale swooned, when he saw Karkat in leader-mode – motherfucking _confidence_ , you know, brother?  Like everything was going to end up okay, somehow, and they could all keep themselves together.  Karkat who wanted to pilot the ship and keep everybody safe; Karkat who knew Sollux's mind enough to coach Eridan on being a good kismesis. Looking at Karkat, watching him care so much for all their friends, Gamzee felt like maybe their plans would even work out and they’d get a happy ending after all.  “Pack up all your shit, no whining, and let’s get ready to do this.”

“Oh, fine,” said Eridan, running carefully sharpened, aristocrat’s claws through his hair.


	8. This is it!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to the second-to-last chapter! And... And, you know. The promised eclipse. :P
> 
> I'm not used to writing about Kanaya, so I hope I did that okay... Also, yes -- lots of sappy/silly stuff here. Sorry about that. Thanks for sticking with the story so long, and I hope you enjoy it! Thanks! :D 
> 
> (There's one more chapter after this, which I hope to post sometime in the next few days. It's turning out to be the hardest chapter to write, though, so I want to work on it for a while more. Have a good day!)

Parking the ship by Terezi’s tree-hive was harder than anyone really expected it to be – she was dangled up above the forest, after all, with periwinkle branches creaking all around her as if shifting in their sleep.  A motherfucker had to climb out over the tree’s trunk to get from room to room, far enough off the ground to crack plenty of skulls open.  Squelch someone apart and splatter them around like confetti.  Gamzee’s thick, heavy highblood bones might have been fine.  He would’ve bruised for sure, maybe have to wear a sling for a little while.  Nothing big.  Eridan, too – he’d just climb right back up, possibly ready to shoot the offending branch down with a blast from Ahab’s Crosshairs.   

Karkat was the one worrying over everyone as they found a way to start climbing, though.  Didn’t matter that his own bones were thin and soft, not grown to last for generations.  He’d parked all crooked, see, but on one of the only branches big enough to hold them.  The ground below was all covered in hammocks, the kind of shit that would probably have to get itself hung up before they watched the moons play their spinning tricks.  They had to strap the ship in, like they were docking it at a port – kind of a mess, honestly, with Terezi watching them from up above.  Her hands were firmly on her hips, and she was laughing a little. 

Karkat also grabbed at Gamzee’s arm when one of his steps swayed a little too far off the branch, hissing, “ _Careful_.  Dammit.  We both know how often you trip over those stupid shoes.”  And that was just fucking typical, wasn’t it?  Sounding so pissed off, but selfless as fuck, sometimes.  As if Gamzee was the one in greater danger up there, with papery pink leaves drifting into all their hair.  As if Karkat just _knew_ he could pull Gamzee back to safety, despite all the motherfucking logic saying he probably couldn’t.  Of course Gamzee’d fall for that kind of pity, that kind of faith.  Of course he fucking would.

“You be careful, too,” Gamzee tried.  Didn’t sound the same in his creaking, upside-down ferris wheel of a voice, but he added, “Don’t go tripping over my motherfucking shoes, either, or…  You know.”

“I know,” said Karkat.  “Now – _watch it._   Go slow, if you have to.  Your pan-rot ass couldn’t walk in a straight line to save your life.” 

Sollux teased as if he were going to shove Eridan off the tree, at one point, when they were nearly to Terezi’s actual hive door.  He fucked up his little one-liner about “saying hi to the roots,” though.  Eridan just scoffed and told him that was all very rude – say a decent hello to Terezi, why don’t you? 

Terezi, for her part, shoved them all inside her respite block without really saying hi to anyone.   She _did_ mutter a little about how if she was going to open her home to a bunch of miscreants to watch a fancy eclipse she’d have to try and smell all the way from _space_ – which she wasn’t sure was completely possible, thanks – they should at least be on time.    

A while back, some awful shit had gone down in Gamzee’s friend group, and that awful shit had up and absconded with Terezi’s eyes.  Gamzee wasn’t really a part of most of it, personally.  He’d tried to be there for Tavros after Vriska had walked him off that cliff, fucked up his legs...   He’d wanted to be there in whatever little ways he could.  Honestly, Gamzee looked back and most of it was a haze.  All sopor and the bloody mash of his own thoughts.  But he knew enough, now, and Tavros forgave him.  (He mostly believed it, when Tavros said he forgave him.)

Gamzee knew about how Aradia had done what he hadn’t, though.  She’d set out trying to punish Vriska for what she’d done.  Terezi had shut her down, saying no, no, she’d figure that shit out on her own.  She’d find a way to teach Vriska she’d gone too far, and nobody else needed to go down that spiraling shit storm of a road.  Well, Vriska got ahold of _that_ tasty information, and as soon as it looked like Terezi was lashing out… Bam.  Or, not really “ _bam”_ – it was kind of complicated.  Started with snagging Tavros’s mind away like Vriska sneaking her hand into a sock puppet.  Ended, after a few roller coaster loops, with Terezi waking up under Alternia’s too-bright sun, her eyes cooked to bright red pits.

Terezi said at least her way no one else got hurt – not like they might have.  She said it like she knew, down to her core, what else could have happened.  And by the time Terezi actually _took_ her revenge for Tavros, Vriska was all, “Fair’s fair, them’s the breaks,” or whatever.  However she would have said it.  It was a long time ago. 

Back in the tree-hive, on that night before the juggling eclipse, Terezi seemed pretty far away from making anyone pay.  She pinched Karkat’s cheek, actually – she got up in his face and laughed about how she could taste his nervousness or something.  It was no big deal, just her respite block.  No need to get all jittery.  She had a sharp, cackling way of talking when she was happy like this.  Gamzee had heard Terezi when she was hurting.  Just once or twice.  It was like a light going off, like a juggling pin falling right out the sky and just lying flat.    

“I’m not _nervous_ ,” Karkat spat.  “Just… I’ve never been here, before.  Haven’t even met you in person –”

“The court rules: you’re nervous,” Terezi declared.  She ruffled Karkat’s already messy hair, making it stick up like the fur along an angry meowbeast’s back.   

Terezi’s respite block had always been full of color and wildness, but it was maybe a little more so, just then.  She’d hung up multi-patterned sheets to hide her chalk-scribble studies and lists, her research into just how she and her friends were going to pull off all their plans.  Karkat couldn’t see that shit, yet.  Gamzee’d gotten some of it messaged to him, but Messiahs knew he didn’t need to understand that noise.  Not his part of the scheming, you know?

A scalemate peeked out from under one of Terezi’s sheets, like it was hiding in a blanket fort.  A couple other trolls were waiting among those sheets, too – Kanaya, Vriska and Feferi, actually.  Vriska was drawing a fancy sword in blue chalk as Kanaya read to her from a book Gamzee couldn’t see very well.  Eridan had been all swaggering around, fucking with Sollux, hate-flirting as they climbed, but the minute he saw Feferi he kind of shrank.  His eyes got wide, and his mouth got tight.  He held so still as everyone else said hi and shit.    

At first, Feferi tried smiling vaguely at everyone and then turning back to her own soft, small hands, with dimples in the knuckles.  She fiddled with the rings on her fingers, and didn’t look at Eridan until he sort of made her.  What happened was, while Terezi and Vriska were tag-teaming Karkat, making fun in a way he didn’t seem to completely hate…  While Sollux was telling Kanaya that no, she hadn’t been wrong about his travel plans – he’d gotten _kidnapped_ …  Eridan took a few heavy, awkward steps towards Feferi.  He’d been waiting for that moment for a few motherfucking sweeps, probably.

He started to say something, hand curled like he was thinking of dipping down and scooping up her claws.  Whatever he had to say started with, “You didn’t reply, Fef, but –”

And that was all it really took.  Feferi breathed in deep and darted to Sollux without another thought, pulling him by the wrist over to a corner and whispering fiercely.  If Eridan’s stare could’ve done what it wanted to do, it would have shot straight through the both of them, leaving big, eye-shaped holes behind.  Ahab’s Crosshair’s, brother.  Only, you know.  In the motherfucking eyes.

Gamzee caught words like, “Dozens of messages,” and “Over me,” and “Guilty.”  He caught the word “Guilty” a lot, and from Feferi’s face it looked like she just really, really wanted Sollux to understand something.  Understand all of her, maybe.  It didn’t even seem like she was using any fish puns.

Sollux wrapped a lanky arm around Feferi, pulling her tight.  He had some of Gamzee’s band-aids up his arm, from an accident trying to get Eridan’s scarf out of the ship’s engine.  They had cute little clown faces on them, looking all sad ‘cause a brother just got hurt.  They were also explosive, if a Subjugglator wanted to play a little trick.  Gamzee wasn’t about that, though. 

“Sol,” Eridan said, warningly.  “Sol, what’s she sayin, then?  It’s bad, isn’t it?”

Terezi sighed, flipped a little hair over her shoulder.  She gestured between Eridan and Feferi as she announced, “Uh-huh.  Okay.  So, I’m gonna take all _this_ nonsense as it’s time to split up into groups.”  She was standing in a very Legislacerator-y stance, just then, her walking stick/razor-sharp blade propped over her shoulder, the other hand swooping around the room as if she were making some really profound motherfucking points.  “Welcome, welcome.  To the not-late, and the just-a-little late: good job.  I guess.  You’re not going to get the grossest jobs.”

“Yay?” giggled Feferi, sounding like she wasn’t completely certain.  Sollux snickered on cue, probably just to boost her up a little.  She leaned into him, her curls dried stiff and salty down her back.  They hung in individual strands, like reaching tentacles.  The golden bangles strung up her wrists made soft chiming sounds as she moved, and she was walking around barefoot.

Eridan looked like he really, really wanted to say something still, but was thinking maybe he shouldn’t try again.  He was grinding his fangs so hard Gamzee could see his jaw working through his freckly grey cheeks.

“Yay.  Sure.”  Terezi nodded to Feferi, not even missing a beat.  “Karkat, Eridan and Vriska – you guys go set up the viewing area.  Make it comfortable, but not comfortable enough to fall out of my tree.  You’ll be hanging hammocks, and trying not to slip to your deaths.  Deal?”

“Deal,” Vriska drawled, making a finger gun and pointing it at Terezi like a promise.  Scourge Sisters.  Something about Scourge Sisters, probably.

“Kanaya, Gamzee and Sollux, you’re all on food.  Cook stuff, bake stuff, I don’t care.  But if you don’t make it good, we’ll all know who to blame,” Terezi smiled, her fangs all even and sharp as the points she could’ve made in one of the Empress’s courtrooms someday.  “You can use something you brought, or whatever I have…  But if what I have isn’t to your liking – _hm_.  I wonder what you could’ve done to prepare for that oh-so-obvious possibility?  Feferi, you’re with me.  We’re going to make some signs so no one tries parking in my trees again.  I set up spots somewhere else for ships, like, a sweep ago.”

“Oh,” said Karkat.

“Yeah,” said Terezi.  “You should check your troll e-mail more often.”

“You reel-y should, Kar,” said Eridan, trying not to look at Feferi adjusting Sollux’s shirt, asking him softly if he had actually been “kidnapped” against his will.  Sollux definitely winked at Eridan while all that was happening.  It was like a little red light clicked off and then back on, smooth as anything.  Eridan scowled, and Sollux made something that couldn’t really be anything but a kissy face.  Pale-flirting and hate-flirting both at the same motherfucking time – Sollux was kind of a quadrant master, wasn’t he?

Terezi tossed her head back, like she would have probably been rolling her eyes if she still could.  “Feferi was earliest, so her job involves crayons.  Whoever’s here last gets to smear down tomorrow night’s giant hungry lusus repellent.  Spoilers, it smells like death.”  Terezi’s laughter was always a very cutting thing, like the rattling of glass.  She shooed everyone off, then, and actually said the word _shoo_ to do it. 

So, Gamzee was on the kitchen team.  That didn’t sound so bad.  He slumped back to the ship to grab his stash off – well, kind of everything?  There was always the possibility Terezi only had grub sauce, like she’d said they’d all have to eat if nobody got to her hive on time.  When he got back, balancing a stack of pie tins in his tangled, curly hair and with troll plastic bags threaded up his arms like his own version of Feferi’s bracelets, Sollux and Kanaya were working in an awkward, stilted silence.      

“We’re making two different flavor discuses, to start with,” Sollux said, shrugging.  Now that he wasn’t smiling for Feferi or making faces at Eridan, he looked pinched.  Like he had a headache, again.  It took Gamzee a second to remember that “flavor discus” meant “pizza.”  Why the fuck did highbloods use these different words, anyway?  “It made sense.  There will be two different toppings per discus…  Eh.  I don’t know, man.”

It _did_ make sense.  Gamzee got asked to list off whatever he could make, and in the end was told the “themed cupcake” idea he’d gotten from the battlefield gift shop was so painfully saccharine it would probably go over well.  (Gamzee wasn’t entirely sure what to say to “painfully saccharine,” but he _had_ brought different colors of food dye just in case anyone needed orange and purple waffles or whatever.  Was “painfully saccharine” supposed to be a bad thing?) 

So, then they worked.  Gamzee started half-rapping softly after a while of quiet, and Kanaya told him in her prim, sunny “troll goth” way that he should _definitely_ _not_ do that.  Then she made a joke he didn’t get, and Sollux laughed low and deep in his chest.  It was a buzzy sort of sound, like his mind honey bees at work.  

“Are we certain he can cook without sopor?” Kanaya asked Sollux in what she probably thought was a very quiet voice.

“Oh, yeah,” Sollux said.  “Or I’d have been high for a while now.”

Kanaya was a bit of a motherfucking mystery to Gamzee, if he were being honest with himself.  They didn’t really have any shit in common except their friends – she looked like she’d climbed out of a magazine just then, with her heels very high and sharp as daggers, her clothes elegant and simple as her slicked-down hair. 

But still, it wasn’t _Kanaya’s_ fault she’d featured in some of Gamzee’s more vivid nightmares, once he’d started trying to kick sopor.  She was always trying to hunt him down, brother.  With those painted jade lips stretching into a horrible screech, a chainsaw howling in her hands, Gamzee’s own blood splattering up on her heels as she walked.  They hadn’t even talked enough to be enemies.  Karkat kept saying she was stupidly nice, too nice for her own good.  And wasn’t that whole “blood-in-her-lipstick” thing maybe kind of badass?  Like the sort of Subjugglator who made masks out of skin, in certain ancient Alternian slam poems. 

So Gamzee asked about Kanaya’s book.  Whatever the fuck she’d been reading, up there with Vriska in the sheets.  Sollux would probably have been fine off in his own little pizza-making world, counting out an even number of toppings for each side – he sighed a little, when Kanaya cocked her head, a sneaky, unexpected grin twisting up just a corner of her lips.

“How much do you know about rainbow drinkers?” Kanaya asked.  She told Karkat later that she could see Gamzee was _trying_ to get her, and that it had been sweeter than she’d expected.  Maybe she wasn’t _as_ baffled by his choice in moirails as she’d been, yeah?  Her voice didn’t stop being very proper, not fucking ever, but Gamzee thought there was something a little less hard to reach about it just then. 

“Not a damn thing,” he said.

And by the time he learned probably all there was to know about rainbow drinkers – and Sollux learned too, whether he wanted to or not – it was nearly time for everyone to gather at the viewing area to eat and hang out.  You know.  Wait for the moons to juggle themselves, with all of them beneath, staring.  A celestial circus show.

But before that, Sollux grabbed Kanaya’s arm, met Gamzee’s eyes just as he was taking the last of the beetle fries from the oven.  (Terezi _did_ have a lot of grub sauce lying around, and Gamzee had been stoked to find out Terezi’s oven mitts had rubbery dragon claws.)  “We’re telling Karkat about our plans afterwards, right?”

“Right,” Kanaya agreed.  Her mischievous rainbow drinker-related smile had dripped away into something still and calm, again.  There was a distance growing back between her and Gamzee, he could feel it.  That wasn’t exactly a bad thing – you couldn’t be best bros with everybody.  At least she wasn’t _actually_ chasing him around with her lipstick chainsaw.

“Do you think he’s going to be pissed?” Sollux asked.  That wasn’t all of it, Gamzee knew.  There were layers, just like in a tiny eclipse-themed cake.  Was Karkat going to think they were all ass-licking idiots, for one thing…   Would he think they were lying about everything?  Would he wiggle away from them all, then, like Sollux out of Eridan’s arms when he was getting swallowed by the voices of the dying, too proud, too scared, too angry at their world and everything it stood for to even _want_ to try something new?

It wasn’t like Gamzee hadn’t thought those same motherfucking things.  And sure, maybe they _were_ kind of idiots.  There were so many ways their plans could go wrong, after all.

He had seen Karkat’s bright red blood, and helped find the bandages to hide it away again.  But even so, they still hadn’t talked about it.  Maybe Karkat thought they never, ever would.

By the time they headed out to the enormous eclipse-viewing hammock – actually a patchwork of dozens of smaller hammocks Kanaya had sewn together, she told them – strung up between Terezi’s tree and the empty one next door, Equius was still painting the tree roots and branch tips with some brownish glop.  Yeah, the stuff _did_ smell something like death could have, for all Gamzee knew.  Equius had been the last through the fucking door, apparently.  Gamzee waved at him as he worked, but he didn’t seem to see. 

There were pillows piled everywhere in the giant hammock, and the same plush dragon scalemates Terezi used to dramatically execute when she was younger.  They were wrapped up tight in a filmy canopy, too, draped over the branches like some kind of magical, drifting mist.  It was supposed to keep the sun off, and stop anybody’s eyes from burning up.  They weren’t going to be looking exactly at the sun, of course.  Off to the side, you know.  Where the moons were drifting.  But this was Terezi’s hive, and something about everybody staring up at the daytime sky, transfixed, probably hit a little close to home.  She said they had all better be in awe of her, because the eclipse-viewing canopies had been sold out pretty much everywhere by then.  She’d planned all this shit out in _advance_. 

The Juggling Eclipse was a seemingly random thing, not bound by any one fucking factor Gamzee could’ve told you – no special number of sweeps had to pass before it happened again.  You knew it was coming because the moons shook in the sky, just a little, just sometimes.  They were shaking right then.  The cosmic juggler Gamzee’d been imagining all those nights leading up to this moment was shifting the moons in their enormous fucking hands, getting ready to spin them.  They’d do it for real once the sun rose, climbed up to almost the top of the sky.  But not quite.  That’s what all the fucking articles Karkat had sent him said – not _quite_. 

In the meantime, Gamzee slipped his shoes off into Terezi’s carefully labeled shoe pile and made his way over to Karkat, near the very far edge of the hammock.  Karkat had his eyes closed, his arms folded behind his head.  There were feathers caught in his hair, as if someone’d smacked him with a pillow recently and things had gotten a little out of control.  Gamzee couldn’t tell from far away, but as he got closer he saw Karkat’s eyebrows were all scrunched together, like he was caught in a nightmare. 

“What is _up_ , my brother?” Gamzee asked, when he could finally collapse down next to Karkat.  The hammock swayed a little, when he did that.  Someone said, “Hey, quit it over there!” but it was all muffled so Gamzee couldn’t tell exactly who.

“Spinning moons, apparently,” Karkat said.  His voice was flat and very small.  “What we’ve all been waiting for, and it’s almost over.”

“Yeah, bro.  Yeah,” Gamzee said.  He moved slowly, watching all their friends gathered around – watching Nepeta telling Equius to go wash his hands again because they smelled like hungry lusus repellent, watching Kanaya touching up some untidy seams on the patchwork hammock no one would have noticed anyway.  He scooched his arm under Karkat’s head real slow, and Karkat inched closer in to him without saying a word.

Gamzee was stricken silent, amazed, when it finally happened.  He nudged Karkat to make sure his eyes were open; he held his breath a little, remembering all the things his Mirthful Church said the moons getting all motherfucking juggled could mean.  The miraculous chance that even if every fucking sign pointed to something being impossible, _maybe it still wasn’t_.  Maybe Karkat could truly grab Gamzee’s hand and drag him back to a tree branch if he fell – maybe they had a motherfucking shot.  All their plans working like magic.  All their lives stretching out before them after that.

Far away from them all – not so far as the Empress’s battleship fleets, coming soon to collect them up like golden coins fallen under a table, yes, but far, far enough – Alternia’s twin mismatched moons were drifting slowly around one another.  It was a plodding, dizzy dance, watched through Terezi’s curtain and still against a brighter sky than any of them had ever known.  First one moon was in front and then it fell back, hurtling farther away…  As if trying to escape to the void, escape Alternia once and for all.  It got dragged back soon enough.  For a few breaths, Alternia’s moons orbited each other.  Pink and green, getting mixed up together up in space.  Matespritship, maybe.  Moirallegiance.

When Gamzee scraped his eyes away from the motherfucking sky, he found out that Karkat had been watching all their friends pretty much the whole time.  He followed Karkat’s gaze to Vriska, whispering at Terezi, holding her arm tight in all those long, spidery fingers…  To Terezi herself, breathing nice and deep as if the eclipse’s air did truly, truly smell different.

To Kanaya, who was at Vriska’s other side and staring up with a puzzled look on her face.  To Equius, trying to capture a perfect video of the spinning multicolored moons on some fancy camera he’d built.  Nepeta was watching Equius doing that, glancing up to the moons and then back again, her eyes all clear and bright – as though they couldn’t even remember getting motherfucking bloodshot crying.  Sollux sat between Eridan and Feferi, holding both their hands tucked under some blankets in a way that meant he probably didn’t think anyone could tell what he was doing.  Eridan was looking up at the moons with a face that said something like, “Okay fine.  This is fuckin fine, for _now_.”  Gamzee would later find out Sollux was thumb wrestling Eridan even while gently stroking Feferi’s knuckles.  Two loves – two very different loves.                             

Tavros’s head was in Aradia’s lap, his chair balanced precariously out by the shoe pile.  Aradia was telling him a story, soft and sweet, about their Team Charge personas and some kind of adventure to a temple that only opened right when the moons started juggling.  Gamzee could hear her at it, if he listened close enough.  At least it was making Tavros snicker, or interject some witty, stuttering one-liners.  Aradia must have felt really warm inside, bubbling like a bottle of Faygo, to know she was making Tav laugh like that.

“This is both the first and last time we’ll all be together like this,” Karkat told Gamzee.  When he flicked his eyes up to the moons and back again, Gamzee could see the bright red blood creeping in to fill up his grey irises.  To brand him for adulthood, Karkat probably thought.  So he couldn’t even motherfucking try and hide. 

“Shhh, motherfucker,” Gamzee offered.  It wasn’t a lot, but it was in the gentlest voice he knew.  “We’ll see about all that noise.  Just another minute, I think.” 

And then they both looked up, again, and the moons kept on spinning.


	9. What do you think, bro?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so first off, as always – THANK YOU for reading this!! :O  
> And also. ALSO, this last chapter is much longer than I’d anticipated. Sorry about that. We’ll… We’ll see how I did. This is definitely not my first draft, at any rate... I hope I stick the landing! 
> 
> Have a great day! It means a lot that you’d get all the way through my goofy road trip AU story… My attempt to write potential for a sappy, no-game Happy Ending. :P I hope you enjoy/enjoyed the ride!

After the moons calmed their asses back down, chasing each other real slow around Alternia again, everybody waited.  Shifted.  Nobody knew what the fuck to say first.  Terezi pulled a red tab on her fancy canopy and another, thicker layer dropped down, tucking them all into some motherfucking darkness.  Some people clicked on their mobile husktops, then, lighting themselves up in dim, far away glows that kind of reminded Gamzee of stars.  Especially the way stars looked when he’d been on a fuck ton of sopor, with everything kind of blurry and shaking.  Becoming like smoke – like running ink.     

All that light made the space look motherfucking ghostly.  Unfamiliar, even as it had been so cozy just a second ago.  Gamzee listened to everyone shifting, and closed his eyes.  He breathed in the smell of the forest, just then – murmuring pastel trees, Equius’s sweat, leftover pizza.  He sorted out what he could possibly say, but it came slow, slower than dripping sopor.  And after all the times he’d thought about telling Karkat, too.  After all the times he’d ached for those words, now they were just getting stuck in his throat. 

Their plan had _steps_ , you know?  Lots of fiddly details Karkat was maybe gonna have to get troll e-mailed to him later.  Not the juicy stuff, of course – a brother’d get motherfucking culled if they wrote up anything good and got caught.  But Karkat would get a little bit, just then, the same way Eridan had told Gamzee about their plans when he was recovering from that overdose a while back…  The way Sollux had told Eridan, and Feferi had told him.  Just a little bit so they knew whether Karkat was in or out, and then they’d all go to sleep.  Terezi’s hive was just barely big enough for all of them, and she had a strict “Bring Your Own Portable Recuperacoon” policy.

Should Gamzee have just shot out with it, then, like some Jack-in-the-Box motherfucker?  _We’re going to try and save all our asses.  Yours too, brother.  We’re going to try and change things._  

“ _Someone_ is going to have to speak,” Kanaya said, crisply.  “If it must be me, so be it.”

The world held real motherfucking still, for a second.  Well.  As still as a hammock-world hanging between two enormous, swaying trees could really get.

Before anyone else could work up their nerve, Karkat announced, “I have about one sweep left, and all you assholes know it.  Don’t anybody try putting a pretty face on it, like I used to.  Thinking I might get good enough at fighting or whatever, good enough that the Empress would want me around despite – well, fuck.  _Despite everything_.  She won’t.  It’s over.”  There was something of what he would call “Old Karkat” in his voice, just then – a defensiveness Gamzee hadn’t heard in all the time they’d been traveling together.  “I might not be the only one of us, but we all know I’m dead for sure.  Gamzee’s gonna do his best to save you, Tavros.  And Terezi, you’re a fucking genius Legislacerator candidate.  They’re stupid as the hoofbeast shit smeared on Equius’s shoe if they don’t keep you breathing.  But _me_ …  I don’t know what could be done for me.”

“Karkat, bro –” Gamzee started.

Karkat wasn’t finished yet.  He had shifted up and away from Gamzee.  He had folded in on himself, like a hermit crab ducking into his shell.  He wasn’t looking at his friends, or down at his own self, or at anything.

“I want to thank you all.  I’ve called you a lot of things over the sweeps – ignorant losers, creepy, sweat-soaked asslords, the shit stains on our poor planet’s underwear…  Yeah.  But I want you all to know it means a lot to me.  You know.  This.”  Karkat swiped a hand all around the hammock, like he was swinging his sickle out into a crowd of faceless enemies.  His cheeks were a dark, too-honest crimson about then.  “ _You_.  I’m not good at saying it, and I’ve only really started to show it lately, but…”

“Good for you, Karkat,” Vriska chuckled.  “If you didn’t like us, I’d tell Feferi to give up on our plan to save your stupid life.”

“To save all our ‘stupid lives,’” Tavros corrected.  Fuck, when had he gotten so bold?  Gamzee could still remember when it was a big deal for Tavros to steal his motherfucking emoticon nose, offering up little clown-smiles of his own.  “To save – uh, you know.  Every ‘ _stupid life’_ on Alternia.”     

“It’s not like I’d listen, though,” Feferi said.  “Even if Vriska _did_ try to change my mind.”  She was talking like an Heiress just then.  All ringing, glittery words, like her Trollian text should’ve been written up in gold.  She snatched Sollux’s mobile husktop right out of his hands and angled its light on her face – it was like she was telling motherfucking ghost stories, or some other, less treasonous shit.     

“Karkat, my lusus says she can help me kill Her Imperious Condescension,” Feferi announced.  She was swiveled over on her knees, looking Karkat straight in the eyes.  Fuchsia to mutant red.  Empress-to-be to an almost-outcast.

“The fuck?” Karkat breathed. 

“I am going to become the weapon our people need – I am going to become whatever Gl'bgolyb is willing to help me become.  But!”  And here a little of the quintessential Feferi showed through.  She tossed some bouncy curls over her shoulder, flashed a smile that was just _so many_ needle-thin deep ocean fangs.  She and Nepeta had matching fake glitter tattoos on their wrists.  Gamzee’d noticed earlier, and been sort of jealous.  “But I can’t do it without you.  See, Gl'bgolyb told me about a second mission we need done if I’m going to win.  If we’re going to take Alternia back if – _when_ – I do win…  And you’ve been recruited, Karkat.”  She giggled, high pitched.  Too nervous for her new, nearly-royal voice.  “You could say you’ve been _drafted_.”

“Huh,” said Karkat, even though Gamzee knew damn well his dream had always been to be _drafted_ for something.  To be needed, to have a raging, bloodthirsty cause.  It had been one of the things he’d understood most about Karkat, way back when.  Even before they’d gotten all pale for each other, you know?  Karkat with his military shit, Gamzee with his gods.  “That’s fucking dumb.”

“Would you tell _Gl'bgolyb_ that it’s dumb?” Feferi asked, eyes all wide and innocent, glowing motherfucking deep sea bright in that hammock-y darkness.  “She’d krill you for it, you know.  Eat you up like you’d eat a shrimp.  Or something _smaller_!”

And then Feferi told Karkat to listen.  No, she told the whole waiting hammock to listen, and when she spoke it was in a that new, chiming voice of hers.  Even Eridan could look at her with strange, fresh eyes, as if she _hadn’t_ just whispered stuff about him to Sollux wrapped up in a palemance hug.  As if he hadn’t just gotten all pissy because Sollux won the thumb war and then wouldn’t start up another one because the Juggling Eclipse was already over.  Time to get motherfucking serious, and all that.    

Feferi told them all about how she’d dangled in the almost endless dark beneath Alternia, staring into the mind of a seaborn horrorterror.  She’d been limp.  She’d listened to all her lusus’s ponderous whisperings, just as she had her whole motherfucking life.  Gl'bgolyb’s tentacles churned the ocean all around her, like stirring the pot that was their world.  And as Feferi listened, Gl'bgolyb said that all her teachings before then had been useless.  They were meant for a different Feferi – they were for a different time.  The universe they were in just then was stunted, built wrong from the get-go.  Surely Feferi must have known it, somewhere deep inside herself.

(Gamzee almost felt like _he_ knew it, sometimes, too, waking up from one of those no-sopor nightmares.  _Should_ he have been trapped in an air vent labyrinth, half-convinced he was the monster waiting inside it the whole motherfucking time?  Not knowing his own blue plastic eyes, not knowing his own strange and twofold voices…  Was Kanaya supposed to hate him, and could Karkat have ever really been pushed so far away?)

It might not have been the worst thing, to live inside a stunted universe.  Whatever the fuck “stunted universe” even meant.  

“ _You were created in a pocket of borrowed, fictitious time,”_ Gl'bgolyb said, first as herself in the cold ocean where her tentacles were spread vast as a world, and then again through Feferi while Nepeta licked frosting off a cupcake she wasn’t really planning to eat.  “ _Your timeline isn’t needed to reach the endgame.  To create anything at all.  Do you understand, little Heiress?”_

 _“No,”_ Feferi answered, honestly.

 _“Because you are not needed, I will help you reclaim this world.”_ Gl'bgolyb was almost not a lusus at all, just then.  She was almost more, “ancient god,” almost more, “force of unfeeling nature.”  Even Feferi thought so, and those huge, writhing tentacles were the first companionship she’d ever known.  _“My other child – the one you call the ‘Condesce,’ now – was never meant to rule this place before you.  It is time you take what could have always been yours.”_  

 _“Oh, clam,”_ Feferi said, though she didn’t really get it.   _“Damn.  Whoa.  Yes!  Let’s do it!”_

“That’s really what you said?” Sollux snorted.  “Oh, clam?’  It sounded a lot cooler when you told me about it before.”

“Oh, clam’ is a very cool thing to say,” Feferi declared.  “Or, I’m making it at least sort of cool, by order of the Heiress!”

“Heh, fine,” said Sollux.  He never would have conceded so easily to Eridan, and the look on Eridan’s face made it clear he got the message.  It was a little, secret smile, with a couple fangs biting into his lip.

“It’s happening,” Feferi continued, eyes flicking back to Karkat.  “It’s started.  We’ve mapped out when the Empress will return, and I’m going to play my part.  I might die.”

“You won’t,” said Eridan.  “We won’t let you.”

“I might,” said Feferi.  It was the first time she’d spoken directly to Eridan in sweeps and sweeps.  At least, that Gamzee had heard.  Her voice changed, a little.  Drifted farther away.  “But then – you’re right.  I might not.” 

Maybe in a sweep or so, Feferi would have become someone new altogether.  Someone with scenes of peace and change engraved all motherfucking delicate into her golden bangles – someone who held an ancient seaborn horrorterror’s screaming wisdom between her claws.  Chosen to be an instrument.  Chosen to be Her Imperious…  Something.  Something new.  Not what she might have been, had Her Imperious Condescension never ruled that Alternia.  This would be a Feferi no world had ever known before; a Feferi that could only exist in such a wrong and stunted universe.

There would be an agelessness behind her laughing eyes, then, maybe.  She would wiggle her bare, webbed toes in the sand, and wait for her ancestor to descend like a murderous, golden shooting star. 

And where would the rest of them be?  Gone, motherfucker.  Half of them, actually.  The half Gamzee belonged to, and Karkat, too.  The motherfucking Red Team. 

(When Sollux brought that part up, the part about it being just like a game… About splitting into teams to get all their shit done, Eridan had crowed for a little while about the Red Team/Blue Team thing being so fucking predicable.  Everyone had let him rant about it for a minute or so.  Kanaya even laughed a little, squishing her hand against her mouth so it got all smeary with green lipstick.)

The Blue Team and the Red Team.  The team that stayed on Alternia and got ready for the Condesce, and the team that had some other place to be.

When Feferi told everyone what else Gl'bgolyb said, it felt like something out of Tavros’s motherfucking fairytales.  But Gamzee believed it, and he hoped Karkat could believe it, too.  The look on Karkat’s face was all slack, almost like horror.  Almost like something inside him had clicked off, a computer rebooting.  When he noticed Gamzee watching, Karkat tucked himself even further inside his shell.  Behind his bent-up legs.   

There was a planet across hundreds of seas of star stuff, Feferi said.   A tiny planet without the motherfucking claws to swipe out at other worlds yet.  Its lands were strange and warmed by a dim, pale sun; its oceans were softer places, still, where anyone, anyone could sit by a beach.

Only Karkat could walk that alien world anything like unseen.  He could tuck away his horns, and bleed the right mutated, blasphemous red.  Only Karkat would be able to drag all the otherworldly heroes they needed back to Alternia.

“Gl'bgolyb says we need at least the ‘Seer,’ the ‘Knight,’ the ‘Heir’ and the ‘Witch’ to change our world for good,” Feferi said, voice still all motherfucking new and chiming.  “She says we had them ‘before’…  They helped bring the Empress and her forces down, I guess.  Helped get a new society going.  And I don’t know if it’s chance, or sailing a flushed ship together, or whatever the kelp… But we we need _you_ , Karkat, to get at least one of them to come back.  To take a risk on us.”

It was easy enough for Gamzee to imagine all of them wandering the hidden backroads and shortcuts of space – like a motherfucking road trip, you know?  Only for a long fucking time, and secret as Karkat’s insides. 

Equius would be onboard in case they crashed again, in case they stuttered to a stop where there were no worlds around to save them.  He would have built their ship, after all.  He was working on that ship just then, beneath his laboratory.  Equius would troll video chat with Nepeta every night, confessing his sins to her like to a laughing panicpriest.  And she’d chirp and tease him, make his shoulders relax down, his lip untwist, his hands stop crunching up bits of the ship in nervous, twitching spasms.  Maybe she’d ask to roleplay what their adventures could have been together, if she hadn’t known somehow deep down it was her job to help Feferi learn the hunt.  Learn how to survive, whatever the Empress threw at her.  Hopefully. Maybe she’d remind Gamzee on the sly to make sure there were enough towels around, stuffed in convenient-to-grab places. 

Tavros and Aradia would be there, full of inside jokes and adventure.  Gamzee could imagine painting on the walls with Tavros, scenes out of stories, maybe.  Maybe rivers of Faygo, a whole planet of Tents and Mirth.  _Definitely_ that motherfucker Pupa Pan, who he’d gotten pretty good at drawing, Tavros said.  Murals down the hallways that Karkat would shake his head at as he passed on by.  It would be fine, if Tavros never kissed him.  Gamzee knew that, now.  It would be fine as long as he got so bold he could chart their course, stopping down on one or two random planets to treasure hunt with Aradia – so bold he could imagine Earth ten thousand different ways before they even got there.  Gamzee’d listen about them all and lean back, just motherfucking amazed all through.

It would be enough, to listen.

Terezi would be there, too, and she’d banter with Karkat, shooting back and forth so fast Gamzee wouldn’t even try to keep up.  There they would be, just like they’d been heading out to the Juggling Eclipse.  Karkat piloting a star ship, maybe, and Gamzee listening to that playlist of romantic ballads as worlds and worlds passed them by.  Clothes would be thrown up over the backs of motherfucking space-chairs.  They’d all have to take turns doing the dishes…  So it would be a different kind of home, maybe. 

Karkat.  If Karkat wanted, he could be “home” as far as Gamzee was concerned.    

They could get shot out of the sky again, sure.

They could get caught by the Condesce’s forces, finally conscripted…   Or tried before her own Subjugglators, stripping one of their own of his paint and his promises.  No paradise planet, brother.  Nothing but the Vast Honk and nothingness to come.

Maybe they’d get to Earth and it would be too late – Sollux had rigged a signal, see, and if Feferi died they’d have no place to go back to.  Everyone would have been conscripted, or culled.  They would have been labeled either dead or traitors.  It would be over, and they’d be hiding for the rest of their sweeps. 

Karkat took a shaky breath, and shot out, “You’re sure this isn’t just some fucking scheme you’ve all come up with together to get me to hide?  Hide out in space while you’re all risking your necks, just like when we got attacked a couple nights ago?”  His words tumbled over each other. 

Someone – Aradia, Gamzee thought – was like, “Wait, so _who_ was attacked, again?”

“I told you he’d do this,” Vriska declared, shifting a little in their soft hammock-world so she could shrug dramatically at Feferi.  “Told you he’d stick his head too far up his own ass to see that we’re all rolling the same fucked-up dice.”

“We wanted to tell you all together,” Sollux said.  His pinched face had softened out, by then, and it looked like his head might be almost, almost clear.  “Because we knew you’d want to believe you were worthless, after all this time of thinking about it.  Believe me.  I get it.”

“But you’re motherfucking cornered, here,” Gamzee tried.  He reached out and put a hand on Karkat’s arm – he’d expected Karkat to flinch away, but there you go.  Karkat kept really still, head tucked down, bones shaking only a little.  “Like some blasphemous motherfucker trapped in the Hall of Illusions.  It’s no trick, bro.  I’d be going off to whatever this fucking miracle planet is, too.  I’d be with you.”

“And you believe all this shit?” Karkat hissed.

“Sure,” Gamzee said.  “Why not?” 

And then Karkat choked out a laugh.  Just a little laugh, but it was something.

“We’ll all carry important pieces of this war,” Feferi said.  It was the kind of line she’d probably practiced to herself in the mirror, Gamzee thought.  But they would, wouldn't they?  A hundred tiny revolutions all bundled up into one and bound with a gore-sickened bow.  They would all have to find ways to wiggle out from underneath the shadows that had dominated their lives –

Sollux would have to climb out from beneath the battleship, from his future as an empirical battery.  Feferi had tried to send him to the motherfucking stars, but he’d said no – send his matesprit, brother.  She'd do better on a quest like that.  He’d said he would stand beside an Heiress and a prince, waiting for the Condesce’s ship to show up on that challengers’ beach. 

Equius would have to grow beyond the rigid, grinding cogs that made up his worldview, all carefully hemospectrum-labeled.  If the world was changing, he’d have to jog to keep up.  Getting all motherfucking sweaty, probably.  Smelling even worse than inside their hammock-tent.   

Gamzee would have to outwit the gibbering hilarikiller that had always waited just behind his stupor, just behind his easy and painted-on smile, ready to subjugglate unmirthful worlds that had never even gotten a chance to laugh at the cosmic joke.  He knew a little of what the Mirthful Church had been like before the Grand Highblood dealt it away like a motherfucking limb in a game of mutilation tic-tac-toe.  All blood colors in clown paint together.  Couldn’t hold any motherfucker’s hatching against them.  Maybe he could climb out from underneath his church’s mercilessness, too, and remake the thing again.  Like repainting over a wall.  Like changing the punchline so _everyone_ would finally be laughing.

 And Karkat.  Shit.  Karkat would have to get out from under that shadow shaped just like his own motherfucking self.  The idea that he’d never had the right to be living. 

“We’re not givin up,” Eridan said.  He looked at Feferi a long time, while he said it.  She didn’t respond – she didn’t look away from Karkat, actually, and Sollux’s mobile husktop kept casting its strange light all across her.  Wrapping her up in shadows, like clown paint.  “Sorta sounds like the only person here already givin up is you, Kar.”

That last line was kind of harsh.  Gamzee watched Karkat’s face, tucked mostly behind his bent-up knees. 

He thought about Karkat’s screenplay, the one he and Eridan had heard all about in a seadweller tavern with food Gamzee couldn’t name in front of them and the ocean breathing all around.  One thing Karkat had sworn up and down about that screenplay – hell, practically the first thing he’d motherfucking said – was that the story had to have a happy ending. 

He thought about how it had felt first watching Karkat piloting Equius’s ship over the grey world to his hive, like something out of a daydream.  Some motherfucking miraculous shit – yeah, he knew Karkat would roll his eyes at that, but who fucking cared.  He’d never known it would really come true, that somebody would come and take him away from his waiting, laugh at his jokes and give him a chance to be something completely important.  A _calling_ , even if it wasn’t one with gods and ancient murderous prophesies.  They’d adventured around Alternia, and played Eridan’s strategy game so many times Gamzee was beginning to understand the rules.  They’d escaped death, shoving their way through a fucked-up, hateful planet, and sampled fancy drinks in a big city.

Whatever had brought them together was impossible in and of itself, and they’d all sat watching the impossible on a patchwork quilt that stretched and swayed up above the world.  The Juggling Eclipse had come and gone, for whatever motherfucking reason.  So who’s to say they couldn’t set off on an impossible quest, to an impossible planet to gather a bunch of heroes, in an impossible reality that even Feferi’s lusus didn’t think should really exist?  And yet they did exist, brother.  And yet they motherfucking _did_.

Who’s to say they couldn’t really be the good guys in this story, and all work together to bring the vast, gleaming machine that was the Alternian Empire crashing down?

It wasn’t until Karkat looked up, eyes so wet and red and furious, that Gamzee realized he must have been crying for a while now.  He took a deep, watery breath and asked, “Okay, then.  First.   This next trip.  When do we leave?”


End file.
